Before and After
by
Rosellen Brown

The little boy's smile is so wide, sun in his eyes, that he seems to be
crying.  He is fair-haired, not quite blond.  Or it's the white light
that douses his head and shoulders with pallor.  Suddenly he Rings his
arms up, straight up, and catches a bar in his hands.  He is six or
seventall enough to catch the bar and hoist himself up and over,
swinging like one of those little wooden monkeys who leap between two
squeezed sticks and flip over and plummet down in a single fluid curve,
the kind, no battery needed, that will repeat the trick without
complaint as often as he is squeezed.  But after two assaults on the bar
the boy stands in the scuffed dirt before the camera, spreads his arms
wide, grinning wildly, then clamps his arms around himself, hugging
hard, his hands squeezing so tight you'd think it would hurt.  He holds
himself in a delighted embrace, his eyes a little crazed-on-purpose, as
if to say, See me, I'll do anything!  He is beaming.

She is about eight, all dressed up, her fair hair shining.  She stands
stiffly as if for a still photograph, then, grim-faced, salutes and
abruptly vanishes.  There is a lot of awkward focusing and unfocusing,
crowds, shoulders, a fat boy turning to give the finger to the camera,
amiably smiling.  Even he, like the others, is wearing a suit; the girls
flash by in festive dresses.

Finally, pitching and crooked in the frame, a graduation procession
begins to shape up at the rear of the hall.  Middle school, this must
be, to judge by the half-fledged look of them, some of the boys still
children, just as many of the girls fully in bloom.  A flood of shiny
red gowns pours down the aisle, a few accented with gold braid and a
tassel at the end.  This is for academic achievement; it is called the
"dork ribbon" by the boys who don't have it, joined enthusiastically by
those who do.

As he comes close, the boy, now fairly tall, his face victimized by
blemishes cast across it like pebbles, smiles broadly, again that look
that could be a wince, the way his cheeks draw back and wrinkle.

Then he remembers himself and ducks his head, turning away.

There are no smooth fades between shots.  Fach refocusing is a wrench,
subjects appear with the suddenness of a shout.  The little girl is
standing, who knows how long she's been patiently waiting there, with a
paper cup in her hand.  She is saying something-there is none of that
intimate commentary of the wielder of the video camera who mutters like
the broadcaster at a pro golf game-and gesturing toward the cup, making
a vile face: sick, she seems to be saying.  This stuff will make you
sick.  She is wearing her brother's dork ribbon, she raises its golden
tassel to her face and moves it against her cheek like a little brush.
She still doesn't smile, having obviously decided that gravity is more
fun, more mysterious, in any event, than conviviality.  Then her brother
is there, suddenly, and she is brushing his cheek and he is defending
himself with his elbows, he is pretending to strangle her.

He pulls at the ribbon, disorganizes her hair.  He looks very happy, in
fact: sticks his tongue out, slaps his cheeks, hers, and then they
perform a complicated set of maneuvers I nly best friends or brothers
and sisters have time to work out such rituals-with linked fingers,
knuckles against heads, handclasps, and finally an elbow grip.  They are
falling over laughing.  She disappears from sight entirely, apparently
fallen to the floor under his feet.

Then, against a bulletin board, jostled and interrupted by the heads of
passersby not thoughtful enough to stay out of the camera's way, a blond
woman and a bearded man join the boy and girl, also smiling ceremonially
and speaking unheard words.

The woman is not beautiful but she has the kind of attractiveness that
comes of selfassurance, good, understated clothes, and possibly the
sheen of money (long since overcome but evident, clinging like an old
rumor).  The man looks, in his dark, curly, red-tinged beard, to those
who wish to see him that way, rabbinic.  (There are, in fact, truck
drivers, masons, and gas-station attendants who wear beards like this
around here and no one would think such a thing about them.) He is not
quite broad-certainly not heavy-but he gives the feeling of warmth and
solidity, a good solid chest to nestle against and, evident here, the
habit of making frequent small comforting movements around his children,
smoothing, adjusting, resting his hand companionably on shoulder or arm.
He and the woman turn to each other at one point, just after the large
shadow of a passing family darkens them like a cloud, and, as if they
were clasping hands, grin at each other above the heads of their
clowning children.

She wasn't on ER, never was during the day when she had patients, but
they called her in on it.  She was feeling around Jennifer Foyle's neck
and groin for tenderness, talking over the girl's curly head, speaking
for some reason about smallpox, Jennifer's mother insisting that one of
these days they'd all pay for discontinuing vaccinations-the mother
rolled up her blue flowered blouse sleeve and showed off a large mark,
very badly done.  She speculated that AIDS might be the result of this
generation's having missed their vaccinations.  Maybe, Carolyn thought,
she just wanted everyone else to have a crack at a scar like that, which
was as large as the gold locket she wore around her neck, and pebbled.

Then Karen poked her head in without knocking and told her she was
needed downstairs.  "Really right away," she added with mock sternness,
because she knew Carolyn's propensity for thoroughness, the fetish she
made of finishing consultations neatly and carefully so that everything
was understood, every question answered.

Grudgingly, Carolyn wrapped things up.  "Okay, kid," she said direct to
Jennifer, who giggled.  "Nothing wrong that a little preventive
antibiotic won't take care of." She wrote the prescription, smiled at
the child and touched her sweet bare shoulder reassuringly, and hurried
out the back way because the waiting room was full and the mothers there
would, when they saw her heading out, either stop her for one quick
question or simply be offended, in spite of reason, that she was running
out on them.  The only departure a group of mothers would countenance
without muttering was that of an OB-GYN on the way to a delivery.  "Make
my apologies," she called to Karen as she went.  "See if you can push
everything back an hour."

She had listened so often to her own squishy footsteps along the
corridors-the professional building was attached to the hospital, and
all of it was paved with the same dark brown composition flooringthat
sometimes she thought the sound of hurrying feet was the doctor's real
heartbeat.  There was snow outside, it had been falling all morning, so
it was going to be a car wreck, some kid wrapped around a pole or plowed
into, at the bottom of a long slide down a hill.  She had a faint pang
of anxiety about Jacob, out there after school, at large like all the
others.  (ludith would have been home by now, off the bus and straight
into the warm kitchen.)  But she had mostly learned to quash those:
there's no way for a pediatrician to try out every catastrophe on her
own children.  Anyway, the statistics were with them, for what they were
worth-were with anybody, one by one.

Teenagers in car wrecks, she thought, pushing through swinging doors.
They were bad enough for anybody, of course-the unexpectedness, the
terrible instant consequences-but they were worse for teenagers.  Worst
case, there'd be a death or a maiming so heartlessly premature.  But
even if no one is hurt, even if it's just angry parents and a draw on
the deductible, she had seen so much still-fresh confidence shattered
that way, had seen such nasty psychological fallout.

You might think it would be chastening, maybe get the boys especially to
learn a little care and self-control.  But an accident rarely seemed to
yield more good than bad.

She thought this as she made the last turn to the emergency room, and
already she could feel the anxiety rolling toward her in waves.

She had passed two nurses and an orderly rushing the other way, and
their nods had something in them of a familiar tension reserved for the
awful days, the shocking injuries.  This was a small town, a small
hospital-everyone saw everything, or heard about it in a minute and a
half.  Not good, she thought.  Distinctly not good.

The curtains were pulled around the far bed but she could see an unholy
number of pants legs showing out underneath.  Actually, the curtains
weren't entirely closed-too late to bother protecting anyone's privacy;
if anything, there was anger in the parting of the protective drapes,
the sloppiness of a furious assertion: Look!  See what we're dealing
with in here!  She saw an elbow, gesturing, protrude from the opening as
she approached-Trygve Hanson's, it looked like, the oldest doctor on the
staff, the one who had delivered and doctored threequarters of the town
before the OB-GYN newcomers and the cardiac and thoracic men and she and
the other pediatricians moved in to split things between them.

Carolyn ducked in without disturbing the curtains.  It was steamy inside
the little tent and all of them were sweaty.  But when she focused in,
she understood that it wasn't the heat that was making them
uncomfortable.  Still on the gurney on which she'd been wheeled in was a
girl with her skull stove in.  It was bashed, collapsed like a beer can,
one of the younger doctors indelicately put it.  Her hair was almost
entirely bloody, one side of her face yellow to purple to brown-she was
the kind of sight that renders a doctor an amateur, innocent of every
hope of therapy or repair.  She wished she could simply swoon and be
carried out like any ordinary witness.

Carolyn took a deep disciplined breath.  "Rape?" she asked, though the
preferred phrase, borrowed from the law, would have been less loaded,
softened by terror and anger to "sexual assault."

"Unlikely," said Tom McAnally.  "She was fully dressed, just as you see
her.  In Tuttle's field-you know, over there where they keep the horses,
behind that split-rail fence on Poor Farm Road?"

"No coat, no hat?"

"Looks like not." He cleared his throat like a reluctant boy asked to
recite.  "She was lying in the snow.  Melted the snow down to the
ground, they said."

Carolyn saw it obediently, a large pink circle, as if someone had
spilled punch on ice.  "You think this-happened-somewhere else."

Tom McAnally was looking at the girl's ankles.  Her socks were drenched;
he peeled them down delicately.  "Clearly, somebody dumped her," he said
sullenly to her feet.  "But she died en route.  Had a little pulse when
they found her." The girl's jeans were bloody.  It was only her head
that had been mauled, though, and incidentally her neck, and her ear
torn, but that was more than enough.  A few suggestions were made of
where to probe, what to look at.  Tom said, standing, "Well, the coroner
will have to go over her with a fine toothed comb.  We can't poke around
under her fingernails to see if she scratched the bastard or anything."
He glanced away as if the whole thing made him ashamed to look straight
at them.  He was a very large man with an impassive face; clearly his
emotions caused him trouble he didn't like to talk about.

"Do we know who this is?" Carolyn asked, her voice almost gone.

"Martha Taverner," Tom said furiously, as if he might be challenged.

"Martha Taverner!  I know-you know her, don't you?"

"Me, you mean?" Trygve asked, and cleared his throat.  "I did a section
on her mother for this one.  Early, I remember, maybe thirty-five weeks.
Don't remember why, but we had to.  She was big as a full-term." He
stared at a pleat in the n I olor curtain.  "God, was there cheering.
They only had boys, generations of boys, the Taverners.  They finally
got their girl." He pulled in one long, shuddering breath.  "Hell ofa
sight for me to see just before I retire." He said that softly.  "Nobody
ever taught us how to deal with barbarians, and forty years of medicine
sure as hell never brought me any closer." He turned and pushed out into
the room, as if he'd had enough of all of them.

Carolyn stood staring at the mess of the girl's head-here and there you
could almost see, though you'd be guessing, that she was blond, that she
was maybe sixteen or seventeen.  She knew that because the girl had been
in Jacob's class all the way along.  When he gave a birthday party in
first grade, still full of the flush of excitement at having a whole
classful of new friends, he'd made them invite everybody, there must
have been fifteen or twenty of them!  And Martha had been there, still
very blond, almost white-haired, and embarrassed to smile because she
had so few teeth.  They hadn't gone on being friends-class, or who knows
what, had sent them in different directions.  The Taverners didn't have
it easy.  Carolyn had last seen her packing ice I ream cones after
school down at Jacey's.  Her hair had darkened up a little but she was
still a round-cheeked pretty girl, with an ironic look to her, as if she
didn't take much at face value: Show me, her expression seemed to say.
She had a cool, amused shrug.

Carolyn picked up her wrist, on which a fine-linked silver bracelet
flopped.  Her arm was already heavy with its absolute immobility.  It
was a small-boned wrist, frail as a cat's leg, entirely breakable, but
unbroken.  All of her was healthy, all eager, all wasted.

Someone had shown her.

She had to go back up to her office after that, though all she wanted
was to sit down alone somewhere and grieve and be angry.  "Doctors," she
said to Tom as they started down the corridor, "are expected to be
machines at times like this, going about our business without a dropped
half hour for despair.  Then we're criticized for not showing enough
feeling in the hard moments."

"You're sure right there," Tom agreed.  "They want you to stop on a
dime, turn around, and suddenly you're the pastor with warm hands to lay
on their foreheads."

Trygve had said he didn't know how to deal with barbarians.  The thing,
both good and bad, was that working in this town wouldn't prepare you
for atrocities either-they had those car wrecks, they had occasional
abusive live-in boyfriends who beat up on women and their women's
children, but that was often subtle, rarely gross: the bruises were
hidden and had to be probed for.  Tractor accidents, falls from
rooftops, every kind of bone break, and sometimes some sad, random,
undisguisable maimings.  But not murder-they didn't have murders in
Hyland, population five thousand, give or take a few.  Shopkeepers still
walked down the street to the bank with their money visible in its
canvas bag and no one had ever been hit on the head for it, as far as
she knew.  When burglaries took place, or car thefts-when bikes
disappeared off lawns or mowers out of the work shed-they still tended
to get blamed on outsiders, Massachusetts vandals passing through.
Gossip, here, did the damage between antagonists that guns did in
cities.  It made doctors' ER duty tolerable and let them sleep most
nights.  But it left them, she thought this afternoon, more vulnerable,
maybe, than they ought to be.

She looked for a broken bone on a very little boy then, barely able to
make her usual friendly chatter with the child and the babysitter who'd
brought him in, an older woman with pepper-and-salt hair, bowl-cut.  The
woman was in great distress over her responsibility for letting the
child fall off a big round rock in his back yard, his favorite place to
play.  Ordinarily, Carolyn would have asked for a lot of detail to try
to set the sitter's mind at ease, but now she felt, buzzing like a veil
of bees around her head, the distraction of a dozen questions.  Had they
told Martha's parents yet?  Who had done the telling?  Probably the
police, with their velvet touch.  Ought she to have volunteered?

Good God, they would want to see the girl.  They would want to die at
the sight of her-die or kill.  She took refuge in examining the little
boy's head and eyes for damage.  He was very sweet, had stopped crying a
long time ago and was looking around with an unquenchable stare at
everything in the room.  His eyes were so black they seemed all iris;
she feared they might be dilated unnaturally.  "We've been looking at
his legs and his back," she explained to the sitter.  "But he did fall a
distance and there could be more subtle damage." The sitter's own eyes
widened, alarmed.  Carolyn reassured her; she had no reason to assume
there were problems.  "I'm just being careful," she said, staring into
the child's marvelous face, his eyebrows frail as Oriental brushstrokes,
getting him to track her light.

"Careful is what I guess I'm not," the sitter went on.  She stood up and
paced.  Carolyn, less patient than she usually managed to be, told her
to stop it.  Her sternness was unpredictable, and when it emerged, it
tended to surprise its object.  Was it her blondness that seemed to
promise softness (against her will), her perfectly modulated bedside
manner with its slight hint of conscious control, the frequency of her
laugh?  She did think a pediatrician owed it to her patients to make
visits to her office as stressless as possible.  "It isn't good
doctoring," she had said in public situations, "if the child puts up
such a fuss about coming that it's easier to stay home."

But when she looked at the boy she saw how little it would take to
mangle that strong square back, its vertebrae pushing through flesh like
bent knuckles.  She saw Martha Taverner as a young teenager, or not
quite-eleven or twelve, maybe-in her own house.  Carolyn was locally
famous, had even been the subject of a story in The New York Times that
she thought absurd for calling her heroic because she made house calls.
RETURN OF the MEDICAL cARE, the story announced.

"Dr.  Reiser believes the multiple factors at work in the making of
illness can only be discovered by attention to a patient's entire living
circumstances, and that ideally includes where he lives." The girl's
shirt was off, she remembered, her tiny breasts like tweaks of dough to
cover the apples in a pie.  They rose and fell on her narrow chest; she
had pleurisy and might need to go to the hospital.  Or was that her
cousin (Donna?  Denise?), who lived with them, who was always sick, her
nose always running?  It might not have been Martha at all One way or
another, she imagined a young girl just on the edge of what probably had
brought her to this-a child with a body still pure, free of touch, free
of wanting.  Sentiment was such a dangerous draught, she rarely let
herself have more than a drop of it.  But today, now, the body that was
her art and instrument seemed too fragile so be worth much.  It was
nothing but vulnerable, eaten from within or broken from without by some
hostility that could as easily change directions like the wind and blow
on elsewhere, leave a girl like this another sixty, seventy years to
make a life.  Or crumple it up, bones and lovely flesh and carefully
tended hair, and fling it out, you could do that too.  Someone had
opened the door of a car and rolled out the remains of somebody's
daughter.

"You can get him dressed now," she said to the babysitter, trying for
softness.  "Just keep an eye on him and call me if he complains of a
headache, if he's nauseated, if he seems to be sleeping more than usual.
Understand?"

The woman, looking deferential and relieved, picked up the boy's
blue-checked cowboy shirt.  It was so small, Carolyn thought, it would
fit one of Judith's dolls.

I'm going to talk about that day.  I'm going to ease through the
ordinary motions of the ordinary day, trying to remember: young winter
in Hyland, the snow falling the way I like it best, so quietly, no wind,
no noise like rain-you look out the window after long concentration, or,
better, open the door, and there it is, everything changed, covered with
softness, every angle forgiven, every eyesore pile of junk or ugly car
fender hidden.  And the smell of it-do you know snow smells sweet when
it's falling?  It's a little sweet, a little harsh, acid in the
nostrils, but that's the cold and the damp, and your wet hat and gloves.

The snow's like sugar.

All right-I'm coming toward it slowly.  I can't rush up on the seam
between before and after.  (Not seam, no way.  Excuse me.  Chasm.) It's
not fair to our whole long lives before.  I didn't know before was over
already.  I didn't, and Carolyn didn't either.

I was bringing Mickey Tuohy into the house.  We were huffing with the
cold and the effort of dragging a load of wood from his uncle's
lumberyard into the studio, and it only seemed decent to take him into
the warm kitchen where the woodstove was on, and give him something in
thanks.  He didn't have to ride up here with his wood, that was a little
extra because I give them so much business, so I was grateful.

Mickey has a sweet kind of shyness under his rough manners.  Big, his
eyes pale in a face that was red even without the cold, he stood there
in his cap and overalls and his sloppy windbreaker with the insignia of
his snowmobile club on the pocket: TttAI10U5TER5.

"Coffee?  Tea?" I asked him, knowing he wanted a beer.  "No, really.

Something cold?" I held up a Heineken.

He was laconic; everyone in his family is, at least with me.  "I
wouldn't argue if I was to have one, Ben.  Guess I'll let you twist my
arm."

I handed him a damp bottle and took my own.  You've never been up here."

"Well, when it belonged to Landon and all them.  You know.  Way back." I
had no idea how old Mickey was-I suspect he was grown up, compared to me
and my friends, by the time he took his first job.

"I was in here a lot as little kids.  Chickie Landon and Albert-well, he
was a lot older, he was grown almost-but we used to spend, oh, a whole
hell of a lot of time together." He laughed, enjoying the memory, I
think.  "Horse-and-buggy days, nearly.  Had that big double barn out
there, burned down one summer.  Hoosh, what a fire!"

"Yeah," I said.  "Sometimes seems like everything up here burned one
time or another, don't it?  You wouldn't think anything old'd be left."

He nodded, moody, thinking about it, all the old town landmarks gone.
"Or changed, if they didn't burn," he said.  "All this looked different
then." He took in all the carpentry I'd done, the rearranging, then
murmured one of those "Ayups" you tend to think they only do on
old-codger ads for Pepperidge Farm or wine coolers.  He held up the
beer.  "You like them fancy foreign brands."

I suppose it was an accusation.  I smiled, acknowledging a lot of space
between us.  "Drink up."

"Used to have cabinets over there where you got your window, just a
little teensy window way up there, didn't let in no light, let alone
view." Mickey made "view" sound like another fancy foreign brand.

You can see a whole sweep of lawn out there now, way back to the paddock
that we've given over to garden; there are apple trees, two peaches, and
a pear.  "You put in that picture window?"

"Yup.  When we came, we renovated the wholeBut he was lost to me.  "It
was kind of dark all the time, I remember, we'd be down-we had a game we
called Covered Bridge, had a way of crawling through those chair legs,
in and out.  Jeezum, I can't see how we did that, can you?" He hulked
his big shoulders up and back like a giant shrug.  "Even when we were
little!  Chickie's mom was always on us to keep it down, hey, keep the
noise down!  She'd say 'Go on out with the chickens if you want to flap
around!" I remember that." He chucKled intimately and shook his beer
like a maraca, excited.

"I'll bet Chiclue Landon never had one of these," I said, tapping my
newest man, my shaman.  The wood was so lovely, it was the color of a
cello side, warmed with reds and golds.  He stood in his own niche near
the window.

Mickey came back with the smack of his bottle on the round table.

"No, I guess you're right about that." He looked a little shamefaced.

"Well, Ben"-and he smiled slowly.  "I don't know if I'm allowed to ask
you what in the Sam Hill it's supposed to be." Mickey had this slightly
too respectful quality I could have done without-it was a little too
close to a servant's resentful shuffling.  I don't think I put on much
in the way of airs, but then, I can surely see how he might disagree.

I stood up in front of my sculpture.  "That's okay, Mick.  It's not bad
manners to ask.  I mean, you don't see one every day, I guess." I asked
him what he thought it was.

"Me?!" I love this, when people get nonplussed, as if they might hurt
your feelings because they can't guess your intentions.  If you think
art is only meant to be understood you could feel that, I suppose, no
harm intended.

But he was game.  "Gol-lee, Ben, I haven't a clue.  Truly." He eyed it;
he was wary.  "Is it-a-like a monster, maybe?  Something out of a bad
dream?"

I thought that was pretty good.  I pushed him a little, he resisted, we
did a little dance, and finally he conceded that if what I was trying to
build-but why in the kitchen, he wanted to know-was a shaman, a sort of
medicine mar"watcher/protector, and if a shaman was all that, why, then,
it wasn't nearly half bad.  "I don't know as I'd want him looking at me
when I'm having my Wheaties, though," he admitted.

"Don't he make you nervous, staring down your back like that?"

I said I found him reassuring.  I thought it's like making a person,
after the skin's on the bone you get to add everything you think he
needs: give him an old buggy light like a jewel in his forehead, that
glows in the lowest light, you fill his arms with everything portable,
you polish him with your attention.  Sort of like people with a metal
plate in their knee, I told him, all their crockery, these metal rods
and hunks of things I put on just because I liked them.  Partly you add
the things you want to because he's yours and he doesn't talk back.
("Yeah," Mickey said, laughing.  "Not like your wife or your kids.  Hey,
I like My constructions were getting too grim, though.  So now he's got
a tape deck and the CB radio sitting in this little shelf in his
stomach, see?  look, Mick, it's hard to see it but-" And I turned it on
and got the slither of voices up and down the band, noise brighter than
air.

"Toggle to Jersey Jack" was signing off and going to Honolulu till
winter was over.  Mickey giggled.

I'm getting carried away.  This doesn't matter right here.  Carolyn
calls me "the family narcissist." I am.  I don't bring home a salary, I
don't have a diplomate from the American Council of Pediatric Physicians
and Surgeons, I don't have a brass nameplate on my door.  I try not to
be defensive and sometimes I succeed.  Meanwhile, I think you d agree
I'd better have something.

Enough, then.  I thanked Mickey for helping me in with the wood, I
showed him to the door.  More snow had fallen.  "Careful going down the
hill, Mickey.  We've got a bad curve out there, it's hell when it's
slick."

"Oh, don't I know it.  I remember one time it was greasy, I sailed right
off into that field crosst the way-" He was cheerful about his
prospects.

When he left I stood in the doorway looking out, feeling warm and snug,
the way you do when the lamps are on and the cold is right out there but
your feet are dry.  I was looking forward to the whole long evening: I'd
picked up a video while I was in town, a movie about Van Gogh, and we
were going to crowd into the den later and watch it together.  I had to
book time with the kids, which was getting harder and harder, especially
with Jacob, who was always busy these days, on principle.  (If he could
substitute the flick for homework, of course, he might work up some
enthusiasm.)  There'd be a lot to talk about, I thought: Van Gogh's
madness, his talent, whether it was necessary to suffer the way he did.
And the good adolescent question: Who was responsible for his
pain-himself, the world?  Jacob and I loved to skirmish.  Sometimes I
think we'd choose sides just to have colors to fight under.  He was
getting sharp and fearless; Judith was still too young to mix it up, but
she had promise.  I felt like I had them in training, a luscious feeling
to counter the snow-shocked, inarticulate friends they spent too much
time with.  (I loved Hyland for a hundred reasons, but the intellectual
life of its high-school population was not one of them.) I made dinner.
This has always been part of our deal-Carolyn gets to put the house out
of her head every day and go off into the clear fluorescent spaces of
her office and the hospital.  I get to answer to nobody, but in return I
do the housewifely duties (which I like) and amuse the hell out of some
of the guys I know downtown.  They don't exactly say I'm
pussywhipped-their word, not mine-but I'm pretty sure they tell it to
each other.  But what the hell.  My best dish was red snapper
Veracruzana-green olives, sauce a little spicy-and it could have been on
a menu anywhere.  In New Hampshire you can hardly eat ethnic, so you
have to do it yourself, and I have conquered three or four cuisines
tolerably.  Jacob and Judith were game and Carolyn, I think, was
relieved that I'd made a project out of duty and therefore took some
pride in it.  ("Your cooking is competitive," she says, implying that
that's what you have to expect of a man in the kitchen.  "You learn
recipes and come up with methods as if you're climbing a mountain." I
don't know if that's true or good or bad; it isn't something I have to
argue.) She came in while I was setting the table-the best placemats for
Friday night, a little special something for the Sabbath we don't
otherwise keep.  She called out to me from the hall.  "I'm going to have
to speak to Jacob about how sloppy his parking is getting." She came
into the kitchen pink-faced.  The hair around her face was wet-It must
have been dewed with snowflakes.  She gave me a little hug of greeting.
"His car is all over the garage, Ben, I swear I could hardly get in
there at all."

"Ah, lady," I said, and caught hold of her.  "Between thee and me let
not mere circumstance intrude.  Come bring thy body to the Sabbath bed,
where we"Ben!  Are you crazy?"

I pretended to take offense.  "What, then?  Art thou affronted?"

She gave me a friendly little shove.  "What are we eating, lovey?

Something warm like stew, I hope, or soup?"

We really don't do too badly at that reversal, but every now and then,
more in the presence of friends than when we're alone where we can take
care of it, Carolyn seems a little self-conscious about expecting to be
served like a husband.  This is a small town with a lot of very
traditional expectations, milk and cookies after school and guess who
bakes them?  But not today.

"Chili."

"Terrific." I got a kiss for that.  "Is Judith upstairs?" She bent to
pull her boots off.  Even now, routine or not, I always find it
provocative to see her calves, her lovely pale calves, suddenly
unsheathed like that.

"We had a little set-to about her piano practicing.  We're going to have
to sit down with her and find out if she really wants to go on with her
lessons."

She had gone to the cupboard where we keep the wine.  "I need a little
of this today." She poured generous glasses for both of us, though she
hadn't asked and I hadn't answered.  Then she told me about Martha
Taverner.  "I'm surprised you haven't heard all the wretched details on
your CB."

"It hasn't been on," I said, and I was nearly dizzy with the shock of
it, "except for a second when I was showing Mickey Tuohy the shaman." I
knew Martha's father from slow-pitch softball.  I didn't know him well,
but he was more than a face to me-a smallish, wiry banty-man.  Second
baseman, his legs slightly bowed, his color and energy high.  When we
lost he got sullen and tried to fix the blame.

But when we won he would get drunk on the joy of it.  He was an
infectious laugher.  I couldn't say anything but "Jesus, Jesus," as if
that might clear my head of the vision of his daughter dead.

Just then Judith called downstairs.  I guess she had heard her mother.

"Where's the Boy?" Carolyn asked.  I had to think for a second.  She had
said his car was in the garage, but I realized I hadn't seen him.

"Does he have those damn tapes turned up?" she asked.  "I can't hear
them."

"No, Judith was here when I got back, but he must be-well, I don't know.
Maybe he's sleeping."

Teenagers sleep.  They tell me it's normal.  Sometimes I thought he went
up there, lay down for an hour or so in the late-afternoon dark, and
came downstairs two inches taller, with a doubled shoe size.

"Well, give him a little longer.  This stuff needs to thicken.  It
hasn't reached its, mm-quintessence-yet." I looked under the lid; the
steam of the chili came up and surrounded both our faces like a warm,
sharp-sweet cloud.

Then the bell rang.

It rang into the ordinary noises of our day.  It rasped so harshly that
when I tried to go back to it, or just before, it sounded like the gong
they ring at boxing matches, urgent, a rip through space and time,
promising cruelty and pain.

I've heard about stories, how they're really just a finely strung
architecture of the way things were and the way things turned out, held
together-or divided, would be better-by the most terrible word, the word
that lifts the roof off, lands the ax blow, curdles the milk.

The blood.  All the world's change, its doom, its fatality, is in it:
Then.  .  .  But that doesn't mean you know it when it comes.

Carolyn put her glass down on the round table I had begun to set.

I remember finding it later and guzzling the last of her abandoned wine
when I was beyond feeling anything, its heat, its cool, its flavor.

By then, it was dregs left over from a century ago.

I figured it was someone who couldn't get up the hill.  We have to take
our tow chain out when the weather's mean and yank our neighbors up; it
happens a couple of times each winter.

"Fran," I heard her say, surprised.  They were walking into the kitchen,
she was laughing a little girlishly-he makes her nervous.

"You haven't called me Dr.  Reiser since we first moved here!  What in
the world does that mean?"

Fran Conklin came in behind her in his parka, his navy-blue wool hat to
his eyes, his snowmobile boots leaving serious puddles, dirty ones, in
his wake.  He grabbed at the hat, pulled it off, and stood holding it
like a scolded boy.  "Ben," he said and shook my hand earnestly.

"Hey there, Chief.  A visit out of uniform!  Don't tell me they've got
you collecting for the Policeman's Fund in the snow."

The police chief and I have had our moments.  You have to understand
that the police aren't viewed out here in the country-nearcountry,
whatever you want to call it-quite as suspiciously as they are in the
city.  If there's any Establishment, it's not one that includes them,
only the rich and the old families (which are usually the same).

They're just local boys, not particularly violent, who have a steady
necessary job; they have to buy their own guns, their uniforms.  They
have to plead with the town every time the department needs a new
cruiser, and then get a used one someplace.  But even at that the chief
is a man to deal with, and we've had our hostilities.  I put a sculpture
up one time, for example, in the town park down near the falls-this was
for the 4th of July celebration, and it was supposed to be the American
Family, made of pickup parts, complete with a little wooden dog and cat
on wheels.  People loved it, kids climbed on it like it was a playground
toy.  It made them laugh.  I was really tickled.  For the first time I
thought, Okay, I've crossed a line, they get it.  But the chief didn't.
He got Yahoo on me and pronounced it Refuse or Rubbish or something, I
don't remember how he insulted it exactly, but he said I had to move it,
dismantle it, it was an eyesore-unpainted wood with the detritus of the
moment varnished into it, the non-biodegradables: McDonald's containers,
one Adidas hightop, a hubcap, a button that said ri:EE LYND0N LARouclIE.
Fran won, all the power on his side, but not before the newspaper gave
me their editorial blessing: "Lighten up, Mr.  Police Chic Art these
days is in the eye of the beholder"-and he'd been made to feel like a
heavy.

Nonetheless, we were not unfriendly.  If he was overzealous in his line
of work, I knew I was equally zealous in mine-we were both fanatics, so
we had something in common, and by now we could laugh about it.  But
today, in our kitchen, standing in the sharp aura of chili and
woodsmoke, he was not at ease.

"Keeping busy, you two?  You've been working hard, Carolyn."

"Oh, I've got enough to do, I suppose." She smiled, a little bewildered,
I could see that, around the eyes.

"Get you anything, Fran?" I asked.  "A beer if you're not working?"

"No, that's okay, Ben.  You managing to keep busy in this season?

You must be snug in that workshop of yours."

"Right.  Just bought a neat little stove-one of those kind of miniature
Fishers with the deer and stuff on the side?  Really nice piece of
craftsmanship.  Keeps the place so hot all I want to do is sleep." I
realized, as I spoke, that when I talk to Fran or Mickey I start
everything I say in the middle, casually discarding the "I" as if
complete sentences were pretentious.

Anyway, Fran nodded perfunctorily, since it was clear he hadn't come up
here in a snowstorm to find out how we were feeling.  I saw him take a
deep breath.  "Jacob around?"

Oh.  "Don't know, actually.  We both just got in a little while ago -the
car's here."

"Would you like me to see if he's here?" Carolyn volunteered.  "I'll
just have a look to see if he's up there asleep, Fran.  You-need him for
something?"

He pursed his lips a little, as if he was running something around in
his mouth.  "Why don't you do that, Carolyn," he said, rather too
gently.  He sounded like a man who was afraid he might break something.

I looked at him hard while Carolyn went upstairs.  He hummed for a
second or two, absurd, and kept his hands in his pockets.  He was a
broad-faced man with a forehead ruled like a music staff with creases.

Just in the last year or two he'd started growing dewlaps.

Carolyn came back down looking troubled.  "No, he hasn't been up there
as far as I can see.  Judith hasn't seen him.  What is this, Fran?

What's the matter?"

"I'm going to-" He stopped short.  "He's-" And stopped again.

The more he shuffled, the longer I went without breathing.  If Jacob was
hurt, Fran would be telling us, not looking for him.  "All right."

He looked resigned.  "Something happened up on Poor Farm Road a little
while ago.  Something pretty bad." His face was bright red with the
effort of this.  "And we're trying to find some people to talk to about
it."

"What?  What happened?" We both said that.  We both knew.

"Carolyn-" He turned to her.  "A girl got herself killed."

"I know.  I saw her." She didn't miss a beat.

Her abruptness seemed to take him by surprise.  I could see his face
harden.  "You saw her."

"In ER.  They had her in there-beyond saving, I mean." She was twisting
her hands in a way I'd never seen.  "It was awful.  You know.

But they called us all down."

Fran cleared his throat.  At least he was very uncomfortable.  "Then you
have an idea- And you know who it was."

"But why do you want to talk to Jacob?  What doesHe looked away from us;
he looked at the shaman in his corner, startled for a second, and then
back.  "I don't like to have to tell you this," he said simply.  "I
really don't.  There are days I swear I wish I was back directing
traffic instead of running this show." He put his hands together and
cracked his knuckles.  That always drives me berserk, I don't know why
people think they have the right to make others listen.  I restrained my
anger but it wasn't easy.  "Okay.  Jacob was seen with this girl.  He
picked her up from work, she makes ice-cream cones at Jacey's after
school." He flushed again.  "Made.  Even in winterdoesn't seem to slow
anyone down." A small laugh.  An attempt, to be generous, at shared
humanity with the victims.  "He came by with the car and they took off
like they've been doing."

"They have?" I said, a little too vociferous.  "Martha Taverner?"

Maybe he never mentioned it, Fran said.  You know kids.  And so on.  But
they'd been seen together by a lot of people, today and other days.  And
somebody called headquarters who'd seen the mess in front of Tuttle's
fence, the smashed, the finished girl.  And he needed to talk to Jacob.
When the chief himself comes to your door, I suddenly realized, and I
wondered where my head had been, you'd better believe you're in trouble.
So I blew up at him.

"Look, Ben.  I don't want to jump ahead, okay?  Jacob's the last person
I'd like to think about with a murder on my hands.  This is a bludgeon
death we've got here, a girl with her skull-well, I don't have to say.
Carolyn, you saw it, dear.  There isn't anybody I want to suspect of
doing that, your son or anybody else's."

"Or someone passing through," I prompted him.

He was trying to be obliging.  "Or someone passing through."

And then we went into second gear.  I am making myself dredge all this
up because, I suppose, it still has the little shreds of our innocence
in it, the poor rags of our not-knowing.  We struggled to stay dumb.

"And you don't know where he is," Fran said.

Carolyn frowned the way she does when she's studying something that
won't yield.  "The car's in the garage.  I just-" She stopped because
there was nothing else to say.

He wanted to see the car.

She moved to get her keys.

"No, wait," I said, so suddenly I didn't know it was coming.  "You can't
just do that."

"Do what?" Fran asked me, caught off guard.

"I don't think you can just do that, go search somebody's car.  You
don't have a warrant."

Carolyn was aghast.  She is a good girl sometimes, too often, maybe,
under her take-charge cool.  "Benjamin," she said in a tone I didn't
like.

"This is Fran.  We know him, he isn't just some cop in off the street."

I told her I knew who he was, thank you.  I assured him I trusted him
and knew he had a job to do.  (Later, I thought, I will try to suggest
that she doesn't have to speak that way to me in public, like I'm a
little patient of hers who's been feeding his medicine to the cat.) "A
warrant," I repeated.  "Yes, a warrant, to come nosing around.

What's so strange about that?"

I was trying to picture Jacob, my son, and I couldn't even see his face.
I saw his body instead, the shiny blue jacket he has from the wrestling
team-he wrestles at I 20 pounds-his shoulders in a T-shirt broadening
finally after years of being too small, too skinny.  His Adam's apple
that sticks out these days, exaggerated, like an erection.

He's a nice-looking boy, not a knockout (just as well, I tell him,
though of course he disagrees).  But I couldn't conjure up his features,
it was as if I hadn't seen him for months.  The mystery of desperation,
that seizing-up of the heart and brain.  It just put a lock on memory.
Gone, utterly gone.  I needed to see him for myself, and fast.

Then I called Wendell, the only friend we have who's also a lawyer.

(One of the many good things about Hyland is how few lawyers you have to
know.)  It was too late for the office, but he wasn't home either; only
his inane machine gave out its syrup, which I blamed on Steph: "Wendell
and Stephanie regret that they can't come to the phone now but they want
you to know they value your call." Steph, breathless: she got it from
church, he got it from est.  I liked them anyway, but they sometimes
strained at the edges of my patience, and one of these days, I thought,
rather ungenerously, given that I needed Wendell right now, they're
going to find themselves outside it.  I told him to call me instantly
when he got in.

Judith had come downstairs while I was on the phone.  She took one look
at us, her eyes widening, and went to her mother, who put an arm
protectively around her shoulders.  I wished she were young enough to be
sent out of the room to be spared this scene.  I wished we were all too
young, at least by a day, so that we could be back on the other side of
Then.  But she is twelve.  She's one of us.

We wrangled, Fran and I.  He said he needed to have a look at the
condition of Jacob's car.  I told him it was my car and, as far as I
could remember these things, he'd need a "show-cause order," something
like that.  He told me that playing hotshot lawyer would only make
things (I suspect he meant feelings) harder, slow things down.  "I know
you re his father," he said soothingly.  "You want to protect him.  I've
got kids, too, you know." But he had to ask me again.  "Do you know
where he might be?  Did he have any special plans for today?  Ben?

Do you know anything you're not telling me?"

He looked at Judith.  "Have you seen your brother, dear?"

Judith opened her mouth, but I yelled, "Hey, off-limits!  Leave her out
of this, okay?  I'll tell you what I know that I'm not telling you.  I
know my son-"

"Please," Carolyn said as if I was the crazy one here.  "Please, Ben."

But the man was affronting my kitchen, my family, my day, my sight.  He
was suggesting something unimaginably insulting, and he was doing it in
my own house.  "I told you I haven't seen him since he went to school
this morning, all right?  We ate breakfast-Carolyn's gone already by the
time we eat.  Frozen waffles, right, Jude?" She nodded; she was still
speechless, like someone who'd been kidnapped and wasn't sure it was all
right to talk to her captors.  "Real maple syrup, okay?  Our own.  Grade
B, but good.  Coffee for him.  Or sugar, actually, with a little coffee
in it.  Tea for me.  Hot chocolate for Judith.

His lunch in a bag, I know because I packed it: tuna sandwich on rye,
apple, very good chocolate-chip cookies.  Some junk he chews, Sunbursts
or something, he always throws those in-"

"Starbursts," Judith breathed softly.

"Starbursts.  He says they keep him awake in class.  That's it.  That's
what I know."

Carolyn, not helping, said, "Then what are you afraid of?"

"Who says I'm afraid of anything?" We were glaring at each other.

She wheedled at me a little.  "What are you so angry at?  I mean, why
make an adversary out of poor Fran?" Somewhere along the way Fran had
gotten poor.  "I'm sure Jacob can explain why he wasn't with the girl.
Maybe she got out of the car and walked away, maybe he dropped her
somewhere, a thousand- Fran!" she suddenly said and put her hand to her
mouth.  It was a rough, much-used hand, I saw, focusing sharply, but she
did the best she could with it, its neat nails, fingers modestly ringed.
"How do we know he's all right?  We haven't thought-what if some madman
did something to both of them!  Maybe Jacob's hurt, or been kidnapped
or"Look," the chief said, ignoring her idea.  "Can you think where he'd
be-just-well, say it's an ordinary afternoon, what would he do?"

We looked at each other.  "His friends," Judith offered.  She may have
been the calmest of us, as if having to sound adult pulled her up to a
higher level, while the rest of us slipped backward with shocking speed.
"Why don't you call Frodo and Jackie." She is a resourceful child, I
thought gratefully, an oasis of cool.  She had short fairish hair, cut
like a Dutch boy's; she had the beginnings of a chest, but she was a
dancer and a gymnast, a girl whose legs were always expressing a life of
their own, turning and turning, the spokes of a lovely wheel, so the
rest of her would probably stay like a washboard, flat but nicely
,nflected.  "I'll call them if you want."

Fran's two-way radio gave out a sudden bleat.  He listened to something
so garbled it was like aggressive Chinese, and he muttered something
back, and turned to go.  "Please, Ben," he said to me at the door.

"Please do your best not to obstruct this thing.  Your son may have a
perfect-there may be no problem at all.  Chances are good.  I'd be glad
if he was out of it altogether, I don't know why you don't trust me. But
don't put yourself in front of the law, okay?  'Cause it won't do
anybody any good.  Get your lawyer if you want, but don't block the law
yourself, okay?"

"Of course," Carolyn assured him.  Hostess to the bitter end.  "He
knows.  He-"

"Also, do me a favor, both of you?  Just think for one blessed minute
about Terry and Mike Taverner over there in their kitchen.  Well, you
saw, Carolyn.  I don't have to tell you.  They had to put Terry under
heavy sedation.  Hostages to fortune, that's all we've got, our kids
areI wasn't feeling very tolerant.  "What weekend criminal-justice
course did you pick that up from?" It was less than decent of me.  I
deserved the look my wife shot me.

But Fran had dignity, along with chutzpah.  "My priest, if you want to
know.  Just this past Sunday, he called his sermon 'Hostages to
Fortune,' about how we're living dangerously when we love anybody, even
ourselves, he said.  Then he asked-"

"Weren't they looking for you back there on your beeper, Fran?"

Maybe if he left we'd be back where we were.

I knew I'd regret my shortness with him somewhere down the line.

But the way I understood it he came in out of the cold to announce that
he suspected my son had murdered a girl and was hiding either here or
somewhere else.  Maybe here.  Maybe he really believed we might have him
upstairs, or down in the cellar crouched behind the furnace, so that
while he talked with us he looked and listened very carefolly, feeling
the atmosphere, reading our body movements, trying to pick up the sound
of creaking floorboards, weight shifting out of sight.  It had been the
most offensive and unreal half hour of my life -all I could do, finally,
was open the door for him and banish him gratefully, without even the
friendly pretense of a goodbye.

I still had the cold door latch in my hand-it was black hammered wrought
iron, part of the colonial history we'd restored to the house, and it
felt hard and elemental against my palm, like part of a shotgun.

I stood there clutching it and looking at the old wood of the door, with
its long, striated cracks no cold miraculously came through.  I was
thinking how totally implausible this was-in a funny way (or maybe not
so funny, maybe dangerous), I don't think I believe in reality much.

I mean this, even if it sounds demented.  Events don't seem as real to
me as imaginings.  I live inside my head in a way Carolyn doesn't live
in hers, and just as well, I suppose, for the agitated parents who call
up when their baby's choking or screaming with pain and she has to
decide what's wrong and how to fix it.  I live for making things up.  A
real event, for me, is the good fit of two pieces of wood I have to
glue, or finding two matched stones to set in for one of my creatures'
eyes.

So this was all doubly unreal to me.  First, it was impossible to
imagine Jacob on the run, Jacob even remotely in trouble, let alone
guilty of -I don't have the words.  An atrocity.  When I last saw him he
was in deep trouble with me for running up a couple of three-dollar
overdue bills on his library books.  I couldn't imagine him making real
footsteps in the real world.  I mean, I couldn't really believe anything
any of us did made a difference.  So this all felt like someone else's
nightmare: I refused to believe it was mine, or, rather, ours.  His.

But Carolyn disabused me of that.  I made myself walk back into the
kitchen and face her.  Judith was standing in front of the woodstove
holding up her hands as if she'd taken a chill.

"You should have let him look at the car," Carolyn said.

"The hell I should have.  Not without a lawyer telling me I have to.

And don't go telling me he's my friend, either.  No police chief is my
friend when he comes around on the goddamn job."

She came to me to put her arms around me, or maybe be taken into mine.
One way or another, we fell together.  "Please, Ben," she said into my
chest.  "Whatever this is, it's not a conspiracy." She put her ear
against my breastbone, turning her head.  "Sometimes your anxiety
unhinges you.

I couldn't believe it.  "It isn't anxiety, it's anger.  Nobody ever gets
murdered around here, so he's getting carried away.  He thinks he's on
Hill Street Blues or something."

Judith stirred where she was standing.  "Maybe he's covering up for one
of those dumb friends of his, they're so weird.  Maybe they ran away
together."

We considered it-boys being boys together?-but it didn't make things
much better.  Anyway, he wasn't that kind of boy.

We stood like that, and then Judith came in with us, the three of us
leaning against each other, until we had to do something.  At least I
did.  I had no place to go, but that didn't mean I could stand still.  I
went to the desk where I kept my wallet and keys when I was in the
house.  The keys felt strange in my hand, my hand was strange to me.

If you'd told me the molecules of the world had rearranged themselves, a
little dance of basic structures all turned over and settled
differently, I'd have believed it.

It gets dark shockingly early in January, although it had already turned
a little on the cusp of the solstice.  There was a moon and it was
cruelly beautiful, I thought (at the same time that I thought how
goddamn unoriginal, how melodramatic).  But it was a taunt anyway, how
it laid out a shimmering path, diamond dust, straight up to the garage
that sat beside the workshop I'd made in the barn, a couple of hundred
feet from the house.

The snow was lavender where the light came down on it, like the weird
illumination you see in planetariums that changes every color and makes
white electric blue.  Jacob and I loved to go to the science museum in
Boston-not that long ago he had been at that age when the noisy saga of
whirling planets and inexplicable anti-gravitational feats, narrated by
a man with a deep official-facts voice, was thrilling.

He was easily, unstintingly thrilled, or used to be.  Not now, though.

Boys of seventeen aren't thrilled about much besides their muscles and
their victories against everyone else's brains and bodies.

It was cold enough to collapse my nostrils, and damp, way below
freezing.  Carolyn's car tracks into the open garage were fresh, some
new snow fallen into them but not enough to soften their edges much.

I could see the tracks of Jacob's car were muted-they had taken a lot of
snow, had long since lost their definition.  Carolyn was right about the
way he parked.  The car, crooked, and half over the unmarked center
line, didn't look aimed so much as abandoned.

Holy Jesus, what was the story?  I put on the frail garage light and
used my flashlight.  The car was a roomy old brown Dodge,
oldfashioned-feeling inside, like an empty rumpus room, too big ever to
have been handsome.  It was littered, as always-candy wrappers, a couple
of pink and green mimeographed notices from school on the floor, a
paperback about computers, in a mangled cover.  If Fran had seen this,
he'd have wondered what we were haggling about.  I ran the flashlight up
and down in stripes-some butts in the ashtray, stuck together with gum
that was gray in this light.  (He says he doesn't smoke.  Right now I'd
settle for a little disobedience, even a little flatout lying.) The
backseat was rubble-strewn, too.  Amazing, I was thinking, how the
spirit of disorganization infects everything it touches, like the mildew
that must be crawling under there.  It was a triumph not to have sweat
socks or wet towels to make it look even more like his room.

His textbooks lay splayed on the seat, and a greasy bag with a crunmpled
napkin in it-doughnuts, probably.  It smelled fried.  I finished raking
the seat with my little beam.  Okay, Fran, I thought.  Okay.  You can
have it.

At the last instant I thought I'd have a look at the trunk.  I was
beginning to feel relief wash over me like that moon-white air outside-a
mystery, still, where he might be, but nothing suspicious.

The trunk snapped open and rose with the slow deliberation of a
drawbridge, and then I thought I'd fall over for lack of breath.
Because I knew I was looking at blood.  It wasn't red, or even brown-the
world was a thousand grays out here, like a black-and-white movie.

But I could see the shape of the splotches and worse, the little
splatters that had flown off something.  The something, I suspected, was
the jack.

It was lying loose, out from under the cover that hides the spare and
the tire-changing equipment: it had been flung, fast and sloppy, onto a
mess of-I couldn't tell what, exactly.  I thought I saw a beach towel,
something like a Garfield cartoon, words and picture.  I know I saw a
backpack, and there might have been a T-shirt.  I was wearing heavy
gloves-I picked it up with my padded fingers.  The screw part looked
wet, maybe oil.  (Impossible.  Who oils a jack?) I held it out of the
dark of the garage into the moonlight like something whose neck had been
wrung.  Then I took off one glove and held the glove in my teeth the way
a dog would, and I touched the huge splashes of dark on the gnarled-up
terry cloth, and in the valleys of the shiny nylon backpack.  They were
wet, undeniably, deeply wet, and when I rubbed hard the pads of my
fingers came up rusty brown.

And when I turned, dry-mouthed, I saw that something was caught on the
lip of the old battered ash can that stood in the corner.  It was a
woolen glove-not a kid's mitten, I mean large, gray, floppy-fingered.

I recognized it before I even touched it, where it had snagged on the
raggedy metal rim.  Please, I prayed.  Please.

But it was his, and it was dark with blood that had begun to freeze.

I sniffed it-sour, that funny damp-wool, itchy smell you get used to in
this weather where you're always spreading out your cap and gloves on
the steaming radiator to stiffen up, drying.  I knew he wore these gray
ones, he kept saying "They don't match my jacket, they look dumb," but
hadn't wanted to part with the money to buy new ones.

(I wasn't buying, they were still good enough.  If he cared that much, I
told him, he knew what to do about it.)  They stained my fingers.

Down in the basket, on top of a mess of moist papers and an empty oil
can, I found the other one and baIled it up in my hand.  So much, I
thought, for saying Please.

Then I looked at the ground and saw where footprints, not mine, led away
from the car.  You couldn't hide anything with snow on the ground, it
was like the deer tracks dogs can follow.  It was what made winter such
a cruel tracking season, why they gave out summonses to people who
didn't keep their dogs tied up.  The prints went out to the paddock,
toward the open field.  Slowly, as if I was stalking something myself, I
followed them at a distance so I wouldn't confose them with my own. They
stopped at the fence-second thoughts here, maybe, about where he'd get
to if he went into the woods.  (Nowhere is where.

The trees, thick in a lot of places, up hills and down, go for a few
miles but eventually you're out on the blacktop, on Route 48.  He would
know that; he walked these woods, he skiied them, he had them in his
head the way city kids know their block.)  So they stopped at the fence;
stymied, I suppose, they circled around and came back to the road, where
they disappeared into a mess of tire marks and footprints.  What the
snow hadn't already obliterated, traffic took away, and my son with it.

Our lives are over, I thought, standing and looking down the road to
where it disappeared into the bad curve.  It was just like that: I
thought it in words, like a sign, or like something I could read that
was already printed out in black and white.  It was a simple sentence -a
sentence-and it felt final.  Everything else was going to be detail,
horrible, humiliating, maybe even justifying.  But the fact, an act in
the real world that believed in itself even if I didn't believe in it,
was that our lives as just another family were done.

Later, when things got very bad, Carolyn accused me of airbrushing the
truth away, of manufacturing miraculous salvation, of not accepting what
I knew Jacob had done.  No.  I say that right here, early, totally.

No.  She didn't understand and that was one of the worst things.  I had
no illusions.  But he was my son, and my love is not provisional upon
his actions or his goodness.

All I said was that our lives as a family-no, our hfe as a family, our
single life as an eight-legged graceful animal alive under a single
pelt-was over.

Carolyn, at the kitchen sink, washed her hands under the hottest water
she could stand.  Among doctors there were hand washers and others -she
couldn't imagine touching a patient with dirty fingers.  The water was
so hot it was chilling.  She 'stood blankly, letting the water drip
down, until Judith said, "Mom?"

There was this child to be reassured, right here, wherever Jacob was.
'Yes, darling.  What?" She didn't mean to sound short but the syllables
echoed back at her, separate as stones.  She wiped her hands on her
woolen skirt, wantonly.  What difference did it make?

"Jacob was really mad this morning.  He told me he might not go to
school at all."

Carolyn put her hands on her daughter's narrow shoulders and pushed her
gently into a chair.  "Tell me what happened."

Judith raked her fingers through her hair anxiously; it was the one
mannerism she indulged without even realizing it, like a tic.  Sometimes
Carolyn wanted to shear all her hair off just to keep that hand still.

"Well, nothing happened, exactly.  Only Jacob said Daddy was being
stubborn about the prom.  He said-" But the phone rang.  Then, once it
started clamoring it wouldn't stop, an unstanched flow.  The first call
was her friend Annie Dineen, full of concern and sympathy.  Word was out
already, then.  In this town, if you flushed your toilet three times in
a row, everybody knew you were sick.  Annie had begun "I just heard-"
but Carolyn forgot to ask how.

The second was Karen, her nurse, to ask if she was going to take her
on-call duty, or would Carolyn like her to find someone to cover for
her.  "Karen, what do you-what have you heard, and how?"

Karen, who was friendly but did not think of herself as a friend,
considered her answer carefully.  Considered the size of the gap between
herself and her boss, to whom she was fiercely devoted, and opted for
vagueness.  It took her a minute.  "It's around, Carolyn, that's all.  I
don't know where I first heard-I went to the A I P on the way home from
work, I guess, and some people I knew were talking.  I mean, this is
only suspicion, right?  There isn't anything at all-" Carolyn pictured
Karen pacing at her phone, earnest, a very thin woman only a little
younger than herself, the dark hair that swung around her face like the
perfect slick cap, in those TV ads, of the famous ice star who skates
right up to the camera fast, her hair traveling at a slightly slower
speed around her cheeks.  Karen had that kind of warmth, cut with the
same efficient briskness.  "Everyone says she was pretty much of a
flirt-or worse.  You never know what they-"

"Karen." She was shocked.  "Please.  I don't want to hear this right
now.  I appreciate it, but it's too soon." It was too soon in so many
ways you couldn't even begin to name them all-too soon to accept, let
alone talk about, her child in the disembodied way of gossips.  Even,
she wanted to say to Karen, the well-intentioned ones.  She hadn't lived
with this sickening possibility an hour yet.  What was the matter with
people?  "Some people I knew were talking"-talking, in the plural,
before the poor girl's blood was dry!  They were far out in front, then,
those people; they were already enjoying the excitement of the chase.

She murmured her thanks and when she'd hung up she found she was
shivering as if the fire had gone out.

"Do you want some of this chili, Jude?" she asked, so listlessly that
she uas surprised when Judith answered yes.  She scooped out a bowl for
her.  The smell of it, so luscious only a little while ago, made her
nauseous.

The thing was that there were such different kinds of problems, even
insoluble ones.  Solving them was how she got through her day; she
sometimes thought she could have been a mathematician.  Some were your
own fault, they were difficult or impossible simply because you didn't
know enough-if you'd seen enough babies with neonatal distress, you
deserved an opinion of which maternal illnesses could cross the
placenta, or had to be genetic, or constituted only a passing danger. If
you understood the chemicals stimulated by a particular medication, you
could guess which other drugs would be contraindicated.  Good doctors
not only saw more, they paid attention to what they needed to and
synthesized it and used it.  Those were puzzles she didn't mind, though
she preferred the kind for which she had all the pieces and simply
hadn't figured out yet where they fit.

But this.  The image of Jacob knocked the breath out of her.  He had sat
at the dinner table last night in his leather cap that was like Che's
all these years later (the cap he never took off except for the same one
in black felt, a sort of squashed beret), instructing them in the
precise difference between two rock groups-Fears Without Tears, or Fears
for Tears or something like that, and another-though she could remember
a thousand things she needed to, she had already forgotten this thing
she didn't really care about.  He had looked intense and slightly
condescending; he had looked the way a teenage boy deserved to look when
he talked to his illiterate parents.  On this subject, at least, he and
Judith were conspiratorial, which she liked.  But nowif you didn't even
know where he was, all the rest was out of your control, beyond even the
haziest speculation.  She closed her eyes to think.  Why was his car
safely back here, stashed in its rightful place?

Even if you granted the wild possibility that he'd had anything to do
with this crime-why would the car be up there, solid as a wall?  None of
it-his voice, his vocabulary-computed.  The pieces wouldn't line up for
arranging.

She put a pencil behind her ear as if she might need it to jot down
details, and forced herself to the phone.  Frodo's little brother was
the only one at his house.  Monosyllables.  Jackie wasn't home, his
mother said.  Could she give him a message.  She sounded appropriately
surprised when Carolyn identified herself, and brought forth detail,
friendly but wary-clearly she hadn't heard anything yet.  Carolyn didn't
know her; kids could be very friendly in Hyland and yet not come home
with each other.  They met elsewhere to dc-whatever it was they did.  He
was at track, had been there since school let out.

Carolyn could hear her politely suppressing curiosity.  She thanked her
and let her go.  Wasn't there a bumper sticker, meant to be
guiltprovoking, that asked DO YOU KNOW WHERE YOUR kid is Now?

"D'you want to see if the radio has anything?" Judith asked.  She had
begun to look at her mother with an odd solicitousness.  Her slight
smile was fixed exactly the way it used to be, Carolyn thought, when she
talked to her dolls, a slightly exaggerated kindness and patience.

A delicacy of approach.

"Why not."

Judith turned through music and random deejay talk to the local station,
which was playing Muzak.  They were nowhere near news time.  Carolyn
laughed glumly.  "You can't expect to tune right in to a bulletin about
what's on your mind," she said.

"They do it all the time in the movies," Judith objected.  "And then
they always listen to half of it and get mad and turn it off." She
scooped the dark chili out of the blue bowl as if the excitement had
only increased her appetite.  Carolyn watched her, slightly hypnotized.
SI1e felt disembodied.  With no way to enter the problem, she sat now,
elbows on the table-barred outside, blank, confused.  This was an
unfamiliar way to feel, as if she'd taken a blow to the head, or was
struggling to wake up early in the morning, while it was still dark out.

Then Ben was in the kitchen door.

"What?" she asked, bolting up.  "Where isHe was shaking his head no.
No, I don't have him?  No, this is terrible?  No, it's all untrue?  But
his eyes were alarming.

"I don't believe this."Carolyn steadied herself.  "What's wrong?  Why
are you standing there that way?"

He paused to yank open his parka.  His gloves were off, crammed into his
pockets.  "Oh, Jesus, Carolyn, he used the jack."

"What do you mean he used the jack?  What are you talking about?"

"All right, somebody did.  The jack's in the trunk, it's where it's
supposed to be, next to the spare.  But it's sort of-thrown back in,
it's wet and there was a lot of melted snow in the trunk and-" She had
taken a step backward.  "Where is it?"

He shook his head as if he was clearing lake water from his ears.

"You don't have to see it.  Believe me."

"For God's sake, Benny, what are you protecting me from?  I've seen
every"Please.  And Judith."

Judith, as if summoned, moved to her mother's side, her hand grasping
for Carolyn's.

"Then tell me why you think he used it for-what you saw on it."

"Blood."

She stared at him.  "Blood." She let it enter her mind slowly,
carefully.  "Are you sure it's not grease or something?  Why are you so
sure what you're seeing?"

He closed his eyes as if he could see it better that way.  "I looked at
it as carefully as I had to.  In the opening, the big screw part in
there.  It's been wiped away on the outside, but he couldn't get it to-"

"Could it be wet?  Ben?  If it was out in the snow it could just be wet.
He must have had a flat or had to get the wheels up out of the snow,
maybe he got stuck." She hated the way he bent to the task, as if he'd
get something out of proving he was right: he had taken charge of her
instruction.

"There's hair in the bolts, caught in there.  Long and pale.  Blond.

Isn't she blond?" His voice trembled.

She swayed as if she had been pushed, then steadied herself against the
table.

"And a towel.  A ripped-up shirt.  That old blue backpack, remember he
got a new one because the buckle broke?  They were all in there and-they
had stains on them.  They were still wet."

"How did you know to look in there." She felt defeated.

"I don't know.  I was already coming back down, I was so sure there was
nothing in the car, and there wasn't.  I just thought-let me be able to
tell Fran the whole car's clean, you know?  Slob's paradise but-you
know, unimplicated'.  So I just opened the trunk to be thorough.
God-well, it's a good thing I did, isn't it."

She stared at him angrily.

"Don't, Carolyn.  You look like you think I'm glad about this."

"You look positively triumphant at your sleuthing powers." He was
solving the puzzles, that was why.  At least he felt he was doing
something.

"Oh, please." He went to the sink and began to scrub his hands
attentively.  "When I think I was all ready to call Fran and tell him to
take the car, I was so-"

"This is all wild speculation." She stared at the still life on the
table but kept her distance.  "You don't have the slightest idea what
you're looking at."

"There's blood in the car, Carolyn," he began evenly, without turning
toward her.  "He must have thrown the jack in and taken off and I can't
tell if there's anything in the carpet itself, it's-" He shook his head,
speechless.

"But why is the car here, if he did something like that?  It's here but
he's not?  Oh God, I know somebody's got him, nothing else makes sense.
They made him drive home, I don't know why, and-you can't think he's
involved with this jack, Ben.  You can't."

Ben came back to the table.  "I took it to my workshop.  The fabric
stuff I burned, it's done with, but the jack I took apart." Judith made
a little noise of disbelief.

Carolyn was empty-handed, standing in the middle of the room.

"What do you mean?"

"I mean, they don't need to see this.  It won't help anything.  You
can't bury it out there-unless the snow stops, I mean, it'd have to melt
faster than it does at 20-what is it, 20 or so?" He looked out the
window at the round thermometer nailed to the tree.  "The whole damn
thermometer face is covered in snow.  I could just have washed the
prints off but-"

"Ben, you're babbling.  I don't know what you're talking about.

Come back." She ran her hand in front of his eyes as if she suspected
his sanity.  "Slow down."

He looked impatient.  "I put it in my pile of old tools and stufflike,
disassembled and just thrown in, you know, it's full of dust and hunks
of old appliances and shit.  Nobody would ever think to look, or if they
did, they could never connect it.  You know.  There are other old
wood-chopping gloves and wedges and stuff under the rubble."

								 Carolyn Kicked a quick look at Judith.  "But you're an accomplice if
you do that." She hated it when the children heard her tell even the
smallest social white lie: "So sorry we can't come, we're already busy
that night." Now Judith was hearing her father planning, freely
admitting, a criminal act.  She was seeing him compound everything.

Carolyn wanted to stand between them, her arms held out to the sides to
make a wall.  Judith kept her face down, staring into the smudged bottom
of her bowl.  "Ben.  Have you thought about what you're doing?

Stop a minute, please-let's decide what-"

"What do we have to decide?" He stared at her coolly.  "What, exactly,
is the question?"

She couldn't do this.  It was impossible even to begin to think about
it.  It was happening to someone else, she was dizzy with the unreality
of it.  How did he know he hadn't destroyed something that would lead
them to wherever Jacob was hidden?  Hiding?  Held?  How did he know?
"And you won't let me see it.  Any of it."

He looked at her with what would have been tenderness at another time;
right now it only seemed patronizing.  "Correct.  it's been taken care
of."

She stamped her foot; she felt like a child deprived of candy.  "Taken
care of."

Ben looked around wildly.  He was a bulky man.  He could be menacing if
he wanted to, beard and shoulders, solid legs, woodcutter's chest.  But
though he used his voice all too fiercely, Carolyn thought, he never
took advantage of his strength, never made so much as a move.  Now he
bent beside the stove and picked up the wrought-iron tongs that sat on
top of the wood box.  He looked at them a long time, frowning.  They
were a lattice of meshing metal, the way they folded open and shut like
the little gate she'd used to keep the babies from tumbling down the
stairs.  She watched him raise the black tongs up, over his head, and
swing them down in front of him like an ax.  "Oh, but no.  Wait.  Better
yet." He turned then and swung from the side like a batter going for a
line drive.  "Like that."

She covered her face with her hands.

"i)addy,"Judith shouted.  "That's terrible, what you're doing!  Don't do
that!" The tears had frozen on her lids, stopped there by disgust.

But Ben looked equally disgusted.  He threw the tongs down and pulled
the kitchen towel off its rack and wiped his sweaty face with It.

"Ben, listen." Carolyn stood with her hands on her opposite forearms,
trying to warm up.  "There are so many possibilities, I think we're
being overdramatic here." She was going to force logic on it even while
it slithered out of her grasp.  "He got stuck and needed something out
of the trunk to give him traction.  Or to lift the car up.  I don't
know.  He used the jack and he hurt himself with it.  Maybe she was
under the car, trying to help and it fell on her?" The casualness with
which she put forth this suggestion sickened her.  And even as she said
it, she knew it didn't jibe with what she had seen: that was not a girl
crushed by a car, it was a girl bludgeoned by someone who, at least at
that moment, had hated her.  But why assume it was Jacob who had done
it?  Why was he so sure of the worst thing, and the most unlikely?

"I do know the facts are usually stranger than they look on the face of
it.  Look-" She cast around for something.  "Last week a very hysterical
mother brought in her little girl with her hands and wrists all blue,
did I tell you this?  it's wonderful." Her laugh rose up as wildly as
flame would rise, taking paper out of her hand.  "And she said she had
scrubbed and scrubbed and it wasn't coming off, so obviously the stuff
was internal and she was-"

"For Christ's sake," Ben said, and stamped down hard as if he were
squashing her underfoot.  "For Christ's sake!" He threw the smudged
towel down on the counter.  "Tell me, would you know his gloves if you
saw them?  The gray woolen ones?  Would you recognize them if they were
soaked with blood?" She gasped as if he'd held them up to her face. "I'm
sorry," he whispered, and turned away from her so that he wouldn't have
to see what he had done.  "Sweetheart, I didn't want to tell you that
part.  I put them in the woodstove, okay?  I-what else can I call it?-I
destroyed them.  Bloody fingers, Carolyn."

But she kept shaking her head against it.  Slowly, side to side, she
said no.  She remembered to speak.  "No," she said.  "You were mistaken.
There are a lot of gloves that are-"

"Call me," he said quietly, "when you're ready to consider reality."

He disappeared into the living room and she heard his feet on the
stairs.

"Judith," Carolyn said to her daughter, who was still at the table, her
face gone sick-white.  It had taken her a long time to find any voice at
all.  "if I even thought I understood your father, why he's so
eager"Don't, Mama.  Please don't say." Judith scratched in the bottom of
her empty bowl with her soup spoon.  She was telling Carolyn not to be
so selfish.  She was telling her this was unnecessary.  "Please don't
argue.  It's bad enough."

Wendell showed up finally that night.  This was Wendell Bye, king of the
yuppie lawyers, whose careful guardianship of his fellow townsfolk's
modest assets has by now bought him a Jacuzzi, a 32-foot boat, and a
neat camp in the woods where he murders deer but does it sentimentally,
like a religious ritual, with his father's rifle.

He came in shaking the snow off his shoes with the delicacy of a cat;
big men do that.  His wife, Steph, came with him; this was closer than
business.  We shook hands with a certain ceremony, as if we were
agreeing on something.  When the women fell together, I could hear
Steph's soft consoling voice, the one she gave her boys when they fell
down.  Wendell is a large presence, usually a comforting one; he was a
linebacker at Dartmouth and everything about him, his long eyes
beginning to droop at the sides, his chin, shoulders, wrists as wide as
his arms, all of him reminds me of the loose, generous fleshiness of a
St.  Bernard.  "You haven't heard anything?" he came in asking.

Carolyn spoke out of Steph's arms.  "Wendell, we don't even know if he's
all right, it's not impossible that he's in trouble somewhere."

He nodded.  "Though you'd think a girl would make a better hostage for
most people-"

"But who knows what happened first.  Maybe they ran off because The
possibilities passed before us like photographs in a batch, combinations
of likely numbers, sexes, types.  I assume we all saw them in the same
disarray.

"True," he said reluctantly.  "Too true, too true.  We'd better put on
full speed to find him, then.

"We?"

"They, I should say.  They."

I had the sudden terrible feeling that he was going to be no help at
all.

And I was right.  When Carolyn suggested to him that he scold me for
"being difficult" with Fran, I got my warning.  He was a good Boy Scout.

Wendell sighed before he began, as if I was the object of some petty
exasperation.  Meanwhile, my son's life was hanging out there over a
precipice.  But I understood: somehow it was all too serious to arouse
the proper seriousness in us-I could forgive him that, the way I had to
forgive myself.

"Ben.  A guy kicks his friend the chief of police in the gut, word's
going to spread.  What do you expect?" He turned dutifully to Carolyn
and said what she wanted him to say.  "See, Carolyn, I know Ben loves
this place because it's so small.  I mean, everybody's got his nose in
everybody else's armpit and Ben thinks it's quaint."

"flow about healthy?" I suggested.  "What if Ben thinks it's healthy for
people to take care of each other the way nobody does in New York City
anymore.  Could that be it?" I was thinking of how this town is a braid,
so many people, so many experiences, bound up together, crisscrossing,
tight.  I didn't know yet what a noose that could be.

He shrugged.  "Whatever.  All I know is word travels faster than rain
falls up here and you can't separate them at your convenience.  That's
what goes along with caring.  You can't-"

"Wendell," I said as patiently as I could, which was not very.  "I
brought you up here to advise us, not to give me a lesson in village
sociology."

He didn't look rebuked.  "Can you show me the car, hotshot?"

I just looked at him.  I wasn't being fresh, I was figuring the odds on
whether I could trust him absolutely, and in the end I didn't like them.

"Look, Ben, you can't do that with me.  First off, I'm your friend.

And I love Jacob, Jesus, I've been through every damn class play of his,
I gave him fifty bucks for the bike-a-thon last year.  I don't just give
that kind of money to anybody's kid, you know." I was supposed to smile
with him.  "But, second, you know you can't go getting into this
hunted-animal posture with everybody who's going to want to help you.
You don't want to be in this thing alone, the two of you, believe me.
You'll go crazy, and you'll tear each other to bits, and Jacob, too,
when you get him home.  Don't keep the truth a secret.

You've got little enough to be parceling out a drop here and a drop
there."

Just when you need subtlety and intuition, you get canned speeches.

Where could I find somebody whose judgment was steadier than mine but
not so damned sentimental?  Of course I got overexcited, that was my
trademark.  But I knew what I wanted, a wise adviser who could stop my
mouth with logic and discretion.

I thought I'd better give him something.  "I tried to find some
footprints, but the snow-"

"Right," Wendell said innocently.  "The goddamn snow." And of course he
looked at Carolyn, who opened her mouth to speak.

"Some of the-" she began.  She was going to tell him about the jack.

"Hey-" It cost me something, but I raised one finger in warning.

And got what I expected.  "What is that?  What are you daring to say to
me, Ben Reiser?" She stared at my finger, even when I took it down, with
the look many women reserve for their husbands just after they've been
struck.  "Now you're going to presume to tell me when I can speak and
when I have to be quiet?"

I could see out of the corner of my eye how Steph had drawn closer to
Wendell in solidarity; in exclusion.

Carolyn's eyes had narrowed and I thought she might come at me with her
nails, though I needn't bother to say that isn't the way she fights.
"You can hold your own tongue if you want to, but you'd just better
leave mine alone." Her voice was thin with rage.

The phone rang and released me.  Carolyn had it in a dash.  We waited a
long time to see if it was news.  "Who is this?" she said dully, then
repeated it.  I could see a vein in her cheek begin to throb in
irregular bursts.  "Well, whoever you are, I hope you sleep well
tonight, you're a person of true compassion.  Our first well-wisher,
yes, aren't you proud?  You haven't got much of a brain, but you've got
mighty quick reflexes." When she put the phone down, her cheeks were
wet.

"It's cold," Judith said abruptly.  I don't know if she meant it or if
she was trying to distract her mother-there were any number of things, I
told myself, that people simply said in the course of talk; I didn't
need to analyze every motive.

"Well, then." Carolyn put on a resolved look and went to scoop up a lot
of newspaper from the wood box we keep it in.  "Look, Wendell, we've
absolutely given up on kindling, do you do this?  The Cape Cod roll?"
She counted out eight or nine sheets and began to roll the pile in from
the corner.

"Eight seems to be the ideal, from empirical tests done right here.

Reiser Labs, Limited.  They have to be big ones, though-see, people who
read tabloids don't deserve to get warm.  Oh, is that terrible to say?"
She giggled.  "it isn't very PC, is it?" She covered her mouth with her
hand.  "But, see, this is the perfect end for The New York Times.
Multipurpose, from reading it with your coffee to mulching the garden,
Ben must use up a couple of trees just to do the garden, all the way to
this generous offering of its whole body, imagine that, to make us warm
and snug!  See-then you twist it, it's just a big bow, paper-well, maybe
four, I don't know why I keep making it so precise-it depends, and a lot
of oxygen-" She was pulling the long ends through and making the rough
knots as tight as she could.  They looked like big white birds with
pointed wings.

Steph, casting a long, pained look at me, took Carolyn by the shoulders
gently.  "Carolyn.  Honey." She pressed her to her ample chest.

"Take it easy now.  Just try to relax."

Carolyn laughed and pulled away.  "Leave it to me to be giving
instructions even as they lead me away!" She wiped her face with the
back of her hand, an unlikely gesture for her, a little crude, or maybe
only a little childlike: I remember the babies beginning to wipe their
eyes with baIled fists when they were getting tired; they'd cross a line
and suddenly their gestures were different.  Such tenderness washed over
me-for her, for them, for then-I don't know-that I was exhausted by it.
I'd have given everything I owned just then to go somewhere alone, not
to have to answer, explain, justify.  But if I couldn't think about my
life, what would I think about?  I don't con centrate on wood in a
vacuum, or shapes out in the empty air.  There are always watchers.
Those trees that make no noise when they fall in an empty forest, tliose
are my sculptures iii a space with no eyes in It.

Wendell had said it would take a little legal finagling for Fran to get
his warrant.  He had to go down and type up some papers and then find
the judge to sign them-we were too far from a D.A.  to need one-and then
they'd have a right to the car and everything in it.  I got him and
Steph out as quick as I could and then I took off running.

I swallowed a cup of black coffee like a runner tanking up on Gatorade
for strength in the kick.  Carolyn was on the phone with her friend
Celene, murmuring little half sentences, her voice soft, like a
pigeon's.

All her authority was gone.  Celene wasn't someone she needed to
entertain with ceremony and she let herself go helpless before her,
slack and tired and bewildered.  "There is no way, no way in the world,
what I saw .  .  .  there's some mystery here, Celene," I heard her say,
gathering up some energy and exhausting it in little waves.  I wondered
what in the world Celene was finding to say back.

I also wondered if we should be leaving the phone free in case somebody
called with news, with word of something we'd have to produce to get him
back again.  Ransom.  Bail.

All the way up to the garage my mouth stayed warm from the coffee, and
bitter.  I closed the garage doors.  They didn't really close and I
worried that, even though it was late evening by now, the neighbors
riding up the road would wonder, since they'd never seen them shut
before, and maybe come poke their heads into the opening between them.
But no one looked in, at least no one I saw.  Earlier I had lifted the
backpack, the T-shirt, the towel out with extraordinary care, cradling
them like precious objects, and had delivered them to the sweet little
workshop stove I'd described to Fran; it was still plenty hot from
before.  The mess of it ignited-I kept the bag out, I cut that to
ribbons with my long shears and dumped it in the pile of scraps I glued
and embedded and buried in my creatures-and all of it was down to ash in
no time; I stirred the ashes to be sure.  Now, in the garage, I held my
camping lantern to the carpet of the trunk, but I didn't see any blood
on it-all that wretched adolescent junk ofJacob's had made a pretty firm
nest, by the grace of-whatever.  I wasn't ready to invite God in yet.

But the memory of the stains hung there like a ghost, as if they had a
voice that whispered "I was here" even in their absence.  If there was
any blood in there, a single ghost of a single spatter, that could be
the end of both of us.  Christ.

Well, the car was such a mess it didn't seem farfetched that it might
not even have carpeting in the trunk.  It was a gamble worth taking.

I hauled it up-it looked okay to me, but what do I know about
bloodsniffing dogs, blood-sniffing chemicals?  What if there was some F
I rensics King who could find the hundredth part of nothing?  I went
into my workshop with it, awkwardly, careful not to let it drag on the
ground, an arrow to the spot.  Carpet would make a stinking fire-I
attacked it with a matte knife, and when I had strips and hunks, uneven,
angular, I took them to my scrap corner and fed them to it as if it were
the compost pile.  I stirred the mound of leavings, turned it all over,
flung it up and around as if to let it breathe.  Pieces of clothof-gold
shimmered out at me, wonderful stuff from the Lucky You Resale Shop that
had benefited the Methodist church-somebody's real robe, I think it was,
the kind of garment that Judith used to appropriate for her dress-up
trunk, impressed that someone had bought it once in earnest.  I liked to
cut it up when I needed some shine in a collage; I would purify it, rip
it safely out of context, not tacky lingerie anymore but gold, luscious
shafts of light, abstract.  That was the principle on which I built: a
second chance for all those shapes and colors and textures freed of
their purpose; the dun I olored pieces looked no more peculiar than most
of it, the box of yellow zippers, the batting, the chintz drapes out of
which, just last week, I had scissored gross pink flowers with leaves
like lily pads.  My heart beat so hard I was sure I could see it,
thumping in and out like a frog's throat.  What a sick joke, I thought,
slicing the carpet into triangles and strips: deconstructing reality.
May heaven help me.

My fabric pile was twin to the wood-and-tool pile that had eaten up the
jack in pieces.  There was one soft mound and one hard, out of which I
pulled my creatures bit by bit.  I suspected it would be pretty
off-putting to most sane people, but I made myself stop spinning and
look at it.  Could I have it wrong, could it possibly be an invitation
to plow right in and have a careful look?  There was broken crockery
enough to keep Julian Schnabel happy for a year, and deeply rusted
garden tools, and the stripped fins of an old fan splayed out like a
circle of fish bones.  .  .  I'll tell you, I wasn't ready for deeper
questions like Do I dare?  Should I dare?  All I thought was, Fran
Conklin will never put his hand in there.  This madman's garbage pile,
he'd think -repulsive, organic, beginning to stink of decomposition. The
mess would look to him like the inside of my head and he was not the man
to do an inventory of the contents.  I was betting our lives on it.

Back in the garage, diversion, again, seemed the only refuge.  In the
other car I carried another jack, a terrific little contraption I picked
up last year at a yard sale.  It was called Jack-in-the-Box and that's
what it was, a collapsible little lever meant for one wheel at a time,
much smaller than a full-fledged jack, and it sat in stray pieces in
need of on-the-spot assembly, nestled in a red metal box about the size
and shape of a first-aid kit.  It was about the least lethal object
imaginable, and it was shiny clean.  I wasn't sure how it would serve
exactly, but I didn't think it would hurt.  I laid it neatly beside the
crowbar and all the rest of the tire-changing stuff (which I wiped clean
and sullied as much as I could with my own hands, to imply that I was
the only one who ever changed a tire around here).  I dumped a lot of
grease around on the bare metal trunk floor, and other evidences of a
general sloppiness no one would have trouble believing of me (though it
was, in fact, excessive).  Then I threw in some wood chunks coated, like
something breaded, with sawdust and added a few truncated 4 x 4's, some
oil-rank rags and tools, and other detritus of my trade.  Anyone who
built things, which was just about everyone-every man-in Hyland, would
understand, though most were fanatically neat and would be morally
repulsed by such wanton disorder.  As unmasked secrets went, though, I
could live with it.

Satisfied with the mess I had constructed, I opened the garage doors on
the moon-splashed snow, and just in time.  There came Fran with his
warrant to look at the car inside and out.  I let him look, I kept my
distance.  He pretended to be glad I had "decided to be reasonable"; I
said I didn't think I had a choice, up against a piece of paper.  "Paper
covers rock.  Scissors cut paper, I said, but I don't think he got it.

He went in with two silent helpers sent by the county, a couple of goony
young guys with very short hair-I couldn't tell if he was assisting them
or vice versa, they all muttered in an alien language, heads bent
together-and they lifted a lot of fingerprints from inside and outside.
Or tried-I couldn't decide whether to clean up the junk on the seats and
had finally decided to leave it in its native jumble.

But, just for the pleasure of defiance, I said I wished I could have
washed the exterior of the car, and waxed it for him.

"Thanks for the thought, Ben," Fran said to me, eyeing the car roof
suspiciously to see how clean it really was.  "Don't worry about any
beauty contests-we've got a couple of more important things on our
minds." He sighed like a man who felt oppressed.  "I see you're still
doing your best" I smiled, satisfied.

He was not going to pretend to be friendly.  "Don't think I'm not taking
note of your attitude, Ben; This kind of obstruction gets people
sentences for tampering, if you don't know it."

"Tampering?  What tampering?  You got a whole bagful of disgusting
high-school junk out of that car, I haven't touched a thing in there!"

This was true.  I felt safe and honest.

"Well, then, what the hell are you doing in here?"

I went wide-eyed.  "I'm having a look at the car you want to see so
badly.  Don't I have a right to check it out myself?"

"How long have you been up here?"

I wasn't sure he had a right to ask me that kind of thing but I felt
shaky.  Who knows anything about the law, really?  It was like the body,
I thought, helpless.  If I asked where your pancreas is, would you
really know?  So I didn't take a chance.  "I just got up here a little
while ago.  All I did was look around and I sure don't see anything the
matter."

"What have you been doing all this time?"

This is how you get embroiled.  Fvery question comes at you from a
different angle.  One tiny misstep and you can fall and break your neck
and maybe not even know how you put your foot down wrong.

"Phone calls." (Could they check and see if we'd been on the phone?

Well, Carolyn had been tying it up some-surely they wouldn't know which
of us was talking.)  "Comforting my wife and daughter, who didn't find
it very-" He'd been poking in the trunk while we talked, and bending to
inspect the snowy floor.  "And this trunk?"

"What about 'this trunk'?  The trunk is full of my junk, so-?"

He smiled at me bitterly.  "And the floor around it, where did that
sawdust come from?  The little hunks of wood, those toothpicks of new
wood stuck there on the snow?  Ben, you're looking for trouble.

You're not thinking clear about all this, I hope you recognize that."

There were bits of sawdust we'd walked into the snow-splotched concrete,
he was right, shreds, and I'd better admit it.  "Okay, I looked in the
trunk.  Do you blame me?  I told you, I had a look.  So some of this
drifted out.  So?  Does that make me guilty of something?"

"And all that junk in there?"

"I have to use the car!  Fran, I've got supplies to move around, I can't
put this junk in Carolyn's car, believe me.  She has a fit."

He looked disgusted.  "Your attitude isn't exactly what I'd like to see
in the father of somebody who is possibly guilty of a capital crime.

There's levity here that I don't much like the sound of." He looked at
me hard, studying me, apparently reappraising.  "It's not a decent
attitude, Ben.  I must say I'm surprised to hear a man like you treating
this like some kind of little-inconvenience." They were taking pictures.
They were making a mold of the tire tread.  This wasn't easy in the
murky light.  One of them went to their car and dragged out a huge lamp,
like something a photographer would use.

I nodded toward the socket.  "I'm not sure this place is wired for your
big guns," I said, to be helpful, before I turned back to Fran.

"Then you don't know the difference between anger and levity," I told
him.  I kicked the tire and felt stupid.  I suppose I thought I'd better
stay consistent in my defense of our rights, stay casual, even though
I'd passed out of that first stage of angry surprise.  Sometimes I get
in over my head.  Sometimes after I've let myself go I don't know how to
recoup.  May it not go down as a mark against Jacob.

Fran made a note in his book, underlined it.  The goony guys nodded;
they pointed; they dug their nails into the tread and peered under them
to see what they had dislodged.  "All right, Ben.  I'm having this car
moved now.  This car is officially impounded.  It's going to be
evidence, if it comes to that." He kept shaking his head as if he'd
never encountered a specimen like me.  "I just want to tell you, if it
turns out your kid's in trouble, then you're in trouble, too." He
delivered a little click with his teeth, as if he was about to spit but
thought better of it.  "Got that?"

What could I say.  But there was still an "if" in there.  "Got it."

"And now," he said to me with too much satisfaction, "we've got a
warrant for the house."

I stared.  Why did it surprise me?  They were after him.  When I ought
to have been anticipating the next assault I was like a ship with each
passageway sealed off from the others to keep it from sinking at
shipwreck time.  I'd better learn to envision what was coming at us
next.

"Not the whole house.  Just Jacob's room.  Do you want to see the piece
of paper?"

I did not.

"Try to understand, Ben." The man did look concerned, I'll give him
that.  His broad features were tight, everything that could wrinkle
wrinkled.  He could pull off a good deep frown.  I think he meant it,
too-out of uniform he was a decent man.  "We had to go to the judge to
get this, and he had to agree that we had probable cause.  You know what
that is, it's a reasonable expectation that we might find something.

And he thought we did.  Simple enough."

"You're going fishing," I said.

"We're not going fishing.  We have a well-established legal right to
search the premises where there is reasonable suspicion that the
occupant might have left evidence pertaining to a crime.  No one says we
have to know if it's a weapon or a note or a trail of blood." He looked
at me with disappointment.  "Now I promise you we will not touch the
rest of the house.  Only Jacob's room."

I ought to have stepped aside easily-I didn't think they'd find anything
and the prospect of Fran's trying to make sense of that pit Jacob lived
in was actually wonderful to contemplate-but principle kept fogging up
(or was it clarifying?) the picture.  I opened my mouth on one last
objection, but Fran had begun to extract the papers from the inside
pocket of his uniform.  I was going to have to hear another speech.
"Okay, come on.  You'll be lucky if you can find his bed, let alone
anything incriminating."

We turned to go and I had a sudden flash of the footprints I'd made from
the garage to my workshop: busy me, so carefully clutching the jack, the
carpet, the whole mess, to my cllest, nothing scraping the ground, but
my boots chewing up a trail of my own that could hang me.  But nobody
turned in that direction.  They were too eager to get to pay dirt.

We walked down to the house single-file and the heat of the kitchen
stove broke on us like a flash of bright sunlight, as if we had walked
outside into daylight, not in.  As if it weren't the middle of the
night.

Fran put the papers, with their seals and fancy cursive headings, on the
table and smoothed out their sharp folds.  They were the first of the
state's official weapons against us; none of us came close enough to
look at them.

There's a tin sign on Jacob's door that he lifted from the dump when
they got a new one with half a dozen directions painted on it for GLA55
(ciE I R BRoWN GREEN), cANs, PAPER, and so on into the balkanized
territories of recycling.  It simply said TRAsH, that outmoded concept,
above an emphatic arrow.  (The dump isn't what it used to be, tended by
a little old guy, dirty and silent in the tattered lawn chair he'd
retrieved from the edge of the pit, holding a pitchfork like the keeper
of hell.  Now there was a Refuse Administrator.)  But I still called
Jacob the Boss Dumpman.

Fran stood on the threshold and whistled.  Then he and his sidekicks
tore into it.  This was the only laughable thing that had happened in
twenty-four hours-they lifted Jacob's socks to peer earnestly beneath
them, they opened his closet without relish and unenthusiastically
fingered his pockets.  There seemed to be chewing gum everywhere, not
necessarily chewed but melted in its wrapper.  One of the shorthairs
looked at every tape in the stack of plastic boxes, as if he might come
upon one neatly labeled PLAN F0R MARTHA TAVERNER MURDER.

He found a couple of Jacob's earrings lying loose and made a face.  I
stood in the hall smiling faintly, but Carolyn was having a hard time
with the sight of these grown men lifting the blanket to stare at his
sheets, and shaking out his sneakers, and turning the pages of his
notebooks.  "It's stupid," she hissed at me.  "Thoroughly useless and
offensive and a-violation of everything." Fran was lifting underwear out
of his drawer where, clean though it was, it lay strangled up tight.

I put my arm around her shoulder.  If I had any equanimity about the
obscenity of all this, that was only because I'd been there first.

"So maybe you can see why I haven't just fallen into line," I said as
gently as I could.  "Now you see."

She lowered her head to my shoulder, defeated.  "The occupant," she
muttered.  "The premises."

"Tell me something," Fran said; he was obviously discouraged.

"Have you noticed anything missing?  Sometimes we need to be looking for
what's not there, instead of what is."

We were innocent this time-even with the best will in the world, which I
did not have, I couldn't think what might be gone.  I didn't come up
here that often, and Carolyn, who was probably suffering some
housewifely embarrassment as well as all else, had decided a long time
ago never to set foot in here to clean it or even-worse!to straighten
the piles.

They were conferring about whether to lift fingerprints.  "Now or
never," Fran was murmuring.  "Once that little window of opportunity
closes, it's shuttered up forever." But the crime, if it was Jacob's,
had taken place elsewhere; they were finished with us for the moment.

Then we heard a noise of gratitude and discovery.  One of the
shorthairs, fingering the casual piles of pocket junk in a dish on
Jacob's dresser, had come upon a key chain with a little cylinder at the
end of it, plastic, that held a picture.  When you pushed the bottom it
lit up.  I remember when he kept a photo of our old dog Glory in it,
coming out of the lake shaking herself.  I remember the way the sun hit
the drops and the camera had accidentally caught them, little silver
dazzles hanging in the air like ice chips.

"Hmm," the detective said and handed it to Fran.

"Oh-ho," Fran said.  "Well, now."

He gave it to us in silence, as if the case had just been clinched.  I
grabbed it, held it to my eye, and pushed.  It was Martha-I suppose it
might have been, it was some blond teenager, anyway.  But her head was
turned, so that you could only catch a corner of her smile.  She was
standing with her back to the camera in a slightly too skimpy bikini
bottom, white polka dots on blue, the cheeks of her pert rear high and
young, and she was obviously holding the top to her breasts in front.
From behind, all you saw was pure bare back, with faint pale strips
where she wasn't tanned, and the strings of the suit dangling out to the
sides.  It was half innocent-if it had been a Norman Rockwell painting
of a younger girl, a dog like Glory would have been leaping happily for
the bikini ties-and half provocative, I guess-a moment of sexy fun.  A
homemade Playboy centerfold.  She was laughing.  Her body was new and
lovely and I was pierced deep with the hope that it was someone else's,
who would still get to use it.  "So?"

"So," Fran said.  "A link, wouldn't you say?"

I didn't have to say anything without Wendell there.  But really.

"Fran, nobody's pretending they didn't know each other," I told him,
instantly at the boil.  "If that's her at all."

"That's her."

"I repeat, so?"

He threw it in the green plastic bag that held a few other
irrelevancies: some handwriting, an invitation to a party, a tape called
Deaththroes by a group I've never heard of.  (Thank God he wasn't a
journal keeper, they'd have gobbled that up in a minute.)  No gun,
though, no drugs or drug paraphernalia, not so much as a penknife or a
condom in silver foil.

"That's it," Fran said matterof-factly.  "We apologize for the
inconvenience."

"Thanks for nothing, you mean.

Carolyn gave me one of those warning looks again, right out of the
middle of her anger and hurt.  I don't understand you, I said back with
my eyes.  Why won't you help?

"If the rest of your case is like this, Fran," I said and shook my head.
"Pathetic haul you've got there, for all your official documents."

He ignored me.  "My kid kept his room like that," he was saying to his
geeks as they followed each other down the stairs, "I'd have sent him to
military school, he'd be saluting before he said good morning."

We showed them the door in silence.  I realized we smelled of cigarettes
from standing around in there.  We were sour with the smell of the
cigarettes Jacob hadn't smoked when we could see him.

It was 10:30.  More than once I picked up the phone to make sure it was
working.  I don't know why I kept checking the clock-the shock, I guess,
of how little time it took to turn you upside down and shake your whole
life out of your pockets.  Four hours, I thought, that's all.  Four
hours.  Well, it only takes a second to die.  Four hours, in comparison,
is a slow leak.

It was the first night in my life I didn't sleep a single minute, or
even want to close my eyes.  Once I stayed up forever riding the subways
with a girl I'd just met-we went from one line to another, every place
they connected-BMT to IND to the shuttle at Grand Central and the IRT
uptown and down, drunk on hopeful lust and maybe a little something out
of a bottle.  And when my father died I sat up for about thirty-six
hours, wanting but not daring to close my eyes.

But this was the only time I went to bed washed, teeth brushed, as if it
was an ordinary night, and then lay there for many hours staring up as
if the dark were dirt and I was buried under it.  Out where they lived
on Birch Row, the Taverners were in worse shape than we were, and that
didn't make it any better.  They had some wondering to do but it
wouldn't really change anything important for them when the mystery was
solved.  They had virtue-well, innocence, at least-and certainty.  In
the blank dark of our bedroom we had guilt-probable guilt-and hope, or
confusion.  But I agreed with Carolyn, or tried to agree with her,
fought with myself to agree with her, that whatever we had, it was much
too early-six hours, eight, ten, twelve hours-for despair.

Dear Folks, Took a long tfme to get to Boston, so muoh snow they olosed
Deer fountain (I love that, closing a mountaIn!  Power!) so we had to go
the long long way around.  But we made it, slip-slidIng all the way.

Passed someone x-country skiing on the highway (in the slow lane).

I counted the highways out of Boston-there are 12.  I d sky routes
everywhere.

I know you don't pray, but pray now.

J.

I took it out of the mailbox with an ad for a new hardware store
downtown, a bank statement, and two bills.  At first, before I got the
photograph into focus and discovered that it was the Swan Boats in
Boston Common, I thought it was a card from my brother Stuie, who had
gone to Hawaii with his family over Christmas break.  I suppose I'd been
expecting some sea-and-rocky shore.  But there were boats with graceful
necks, gray-white like the granite of monuments, and the grass an
impossible acid green beneath a sky that never was.  So I turned it over
with some curiosity.  I was walking back from the mailbox across the
little stretch of roughly plowed driveway and I stopped and read it and
the world turned over and stopped dead.

No one had heard a thing, no one had had a clue.  Of course, the police
had put an alarm out-I had never before quite appreciated how graphic it
was to call it an "all-points bulletin" but that was the scartershot we
needed, everywhere, near, far, the whole sweep of the compass.  We
called them endlessly to prod them in the search.  I didn't have the
feeling it hurried them by a single second-they move as they will move,
according to their Procedures.  After a week, Mary, the police station
receptionist, began to answer us-"No news"-as if we were cranks calling
to see if they'd gotten a new shipment of, I don't know what, jelly
beans.  Finally she said to Carolyn, "Mrs.  Reiser, do you really think
you're the only ones who want to find your son?"

And she was right, but who could blame us-just as we thought they'd
forgotten our urgency to find him, I suppose we'd forgotten theirs.  It
was too punishing to remember why.

There was all kinds of speculation, all useless.  Wendell told us people
were calling him and coming by on the dimmest of pretexts-gossip was no
inconsiderable purpose in Hyland.  Everyone knew he was our lawyer;
might he not happen to drop a crumb of information?  (He was so
wondrously upright he would not; he was offended at the very
suggestion.)  The police called for a list ofJacob's friends, for his
hobbies and his habits: "places he might hang out." I tried to imagine
him at the pizza parlor in Howe, at the electronic games in the
movie-theater lobby.

And on the CB I heard outrage, I could sit in my kitchen and monitor the
speed with which "wanted for questioning" became much worse, more
damning and final.  Conversations about roadwork, changes of appointment
times, bad weather approaching, all the matter-of-fact miscellany I
loved about this place, the way voices crackled, low-tech, out of the
box-into every conversation there seemed to break at least one comment
about the "Taverner thing." What a stewpot, everybody's business made
public with the zeal of civic duty.  Once when my brother was visiting
he borrowed my car and parked it on a deserted road to go running.  And
the next day when I was buying my newspaper at the Central, somebody
said to me, tickled half to death, "Seen your car parked up on Ridge
Road there, Ben.  Taking an afternoon nap, were you?" Stuie said it was
impossible, no one had driven past all the time he'd been running. "What
do they have," he asked, a little flustered, "helicopters?" That was the
way news spread; even non news.  We heard there was a meeting of
"concerned citizens" that had gathered in the Taverners' living room. No
one could tell me-would, I mean-what they had talked about.  I heard
something about pressure on the police to move faster, harder, involve
the F.B.I.  I could understand it, a roomful of furious fathers, even if
it made my neck itch.

What would I be doing if I were Mike Taverner, who deserved his rage,
deserved his impatience?  I'd have been up here, I suspected, with a
noose in my quivering hand.

Carolyn, however, concentrated on kidnap.  Whatever horrible history I
had dragged in with the jack and the gloves she dismissed-she needed to
see Jacob alive.  What if he was being tortured?  What if he was being
raped?  Locked in a closet?  Covered with leaves in the woods?

Left for dead.  Dead.  They trained Patty Hearst to use a rifle and do
their dirty work, what if they forced him to rob armored trucks, commit
atrocities.  Steal.  Steal girls.  Steal boys.  She went on like that,
rabid imaginings and half of it I'm sure she couldn't utter, with her
fist in her mouth.  The rest, she said, guilt, innocence, whatever, we
could worry about later.  I stopped arguing, what did I want to argue
for?  I thought, I'd rather he robbed a Brink's truck than murdered his
girlfriend.

Two witnesses had come forward, as yet unnamed.  One had seen Jacob and
Martha together, braked at the stop sign on the corner of Poor Farm Road
and MacNeece Street about an hour, maybe more, before the other came
upon them standing outside the car, in the snow, in front of Tuttle's
fence.  The second one had asked if they needed help.  Jacob had waved
him off.  The police "crime squad"-a unit apparently born for the
occasion-was making a strong appeal to witnesses.  The quarry was Jacob
or Martha or both, or "anything suspicious," which seemed to me
dangerously vague.  Jacob had not been seen leaving town, but what did
that mean?  That it was dark, or nearly.

That he'd been hunched in a back seat in someone's car, his hat pulled
down.  Either an accomplice's car or an abductor's or a stranger's, or,
or, or .  .  .  I don't know why he didn't take his own-too traceable,
maybe.

Everybody had a theory, from group riot to kidnap to drug frenzy.

None of the theories seemed to have much to do with Jacob.  We ourselves
were without a single thought except Dear Lord-Lord if there is one,
Lord if there isn't-bring him home to us and let us run our hands over
him to see if he's really alive and ours.  Let him come home somehow
before they shoot him dead.  I suppose if you'd pushed me I, too, would
have declared for abduction-imagine trying to choose the least rotten
fate for your child-because, though endangered, it left him guiltless.
Mostly we were walking around the kitchen stunned and listening for the
phone, and we heard the nasty speculation begin to waft in on us right
through the walls, and-as he himself was now daring to suggest to us in
an odd voice, unprecedented by any devotion in his life; quite the
contrary, in fact-we prayed.

When I read his initial beneath the exhortation to pray, I was so
stunned that I dropped the card in the snow and some of the letters ran
as if they'd been cried on.  But you could still read them.

When I gave the card to Carolyn she read it and reread it so fiercely I
thought she would put it in her mouth and chew it up and swallow it to
understand it better.

"He's ahve," I said, with a huge exhalation of relief.  The sheer stupid
fact of it was about as reassuring as saying he's blind, deaf, dumb,
drawn and quartered, but he's breathing.

"He's alive and he's crazy," she said back to me without gratitude.

She stared at the card again, shook it impatiently as if she might coax
more speech out of it, turned it over and back again to the
paint-bynumbers picture.  "If this is his idea of communication .

We had to go the long way: who were we supposed to picture?  He was
alive but was he safe?  Could the card be like the phone call you make
with a kidnapper's gun to your temple?  It was postmarked yesterday:
fairly new news.  He wanted us to know where he was.  Did he want
anything else?

"What are we going to do with this?" Carolyn asked.

It took me a minute.  "I guess we're not going to do anything."

"Don't you think we need to show this to someone?  To Wendell?"

"Why show it to Wendell?  What would you like him to do with the
information?"

She bit her nail.  "I don't know.  But it seems to me we've got to do
something with it." She sighed.  She had announced a little while
earlier that this would be her last day away from her office; she was
not made for sitting idle.  Nor for being a victim, either, though I
wondered if she appreciated what she might find at work.

"Would you tell Fran where he is?  Do you want to help get him caught?"

Carolyn sat down-we were still in the kitchen, we were always in the
kitchen when we weren't working, especially in winter.  The hot heart of
the house was partly the woodstove and partly, I suppose, the primitive
sacrament of eating that took place in there.  Cooking and eating:
keeping the body stoked as if it were another stove.  "Why 'caught'?"
she asked me from the center of a fury I hadn't seen gathering.  "Why do
you keep assuming he's got to be caught?  Maybe it's rescued.  Why do
you think-" I shook the card at her.  "Doesn't it calmly describe that
drive as some kind of an adventure?  Doesn't it promise escape?"

"It's cryptic," she said.  "That's all.  Why should you read that as
escape?"

So I asked the question neutrally: "Do you want to see him found?"

I said we'd been pleading with them to find him, only find him.  But
this was a harder question than I had realized-do you want him found? Do
you want to help find him?  It was like some ultimate phil I sophical
head-breaking first question about the order of the universe, the kind
of balance they made stage tragedies out of, only couched in the terms
of an ordinary-looking morning, sun on snow, cloudless, sharp.  What I
really mean is, this was the morning of Martha Taverner's funeral.

I made myself see it.  I made myself.  The girl would be in a closed
casket at LeMois's Funeral Home, wearing her best dress invisibly, a
white rose in her hands (I was guessing, just to make it harder on
myself), and three-quarters of the town would be there, serious in
suits, with Kleenexes baIled in their fists, and, appallingly, we could
not show our faces.  We were sitting here in hostile quarantine and
Jacob, apparently, was somewhere in Boston a couple of hours away,
planning a life in exile but thinking of us thinking of him.  I
considered going off into the woods to scream-it was the one and only
thing I needed to do, the one thing in the world if I couldn't stand
face to face just then with Jacob, and there was no place to do it
without attracting just the kind of attention I needed to scream about.

Carolyn got up and brought to the table the pad of paper that sits
beside the telephone for messages.  She thought hard for a while and
then began to scribble in her impossible doctor's hand.

"What are you doing, writing back?"

She stopped and looked past me.  "It's a list.  Of possibilities."

"Such as?  I didn't know we had enough choices to have a list."

"Oh, Ben, come on." This was a scientist; I forgot.  "We can give the
card to Wendell or to Fran and talk about how to help the Boston police
find him.  We can sit on it and do nothing.  We can go to Boston and-"

"Find a needle in a haystack.  Sure."

She ignored me.  "We can-"

"Carolyn, 'we can't do absolutely nothing.  We can just sit still for a
while and let things take their course without thinking we can help push
them along, that's what we can.  No list necessary.

A look of terrible pain crossed her face-I expected her to cry out,
because it creased her features so profoundly, like an electric flash,
that I was sure it must have hurt searingly, deep inside her head.  But
all she said, just above a whisper, was "It's time for Judith's lunch."

She turned and went in search of our daughter, who, I knew but she
didn't, had chosen not to get out of bed this morning, who lay in her
nightgown, the one with red hearts on it, like a sick child, listening
to Prince and Kenny G.  and staring at the ceiling.

Tony and Celene Berger had arrived with their hands full of casseroles,
as if someone had died, and I tried to be grateful and couldn't, though
I think I faked it pretty well.  It was so perverse not to be grateful
that I don't think anybody suspected-then again, Tony's a pretty
perverse type himself and might have sympathized.  This was Celene's
doing: "The point," she said, experienced at funerals-she has a family
of about fifty, in all the towns that surround us here"is to keep your
energy free for other things."

"That's what I'm trying not to do," Carolyn said from the embrace in
which her friend held her tight, but she was trying, too.  "You're
right," she answered Celene, grateful to be loved even if the price was
having to eat a covered dish fit fur a church supper.  "Now if you could
bring us a potful of what to think." For that, Celene held her a second
or two longer: not that it wasn't sincere, but we learned pretty quickly
that humility goes a long way toward disarming disgust and fear.  When
Celene saw that she was crying, she wouldn't let her go.

Then Annie Dineen came, alternate leader of the Friends' Brigade.

Oh, bless them.  As if we'd had a death.

She took up a lot of the kitchen: she is tall, broad, curly-headed, and
rarely quiet.  The children loved her.  Everything about her has always
seemed slightly larger than life; she always brought goodies, unlikely
ones like metal crickets you could hide in your hand and hangers bent
into shapes that could make square bubbles, and she took away things
that needed fixing.  She did them a hell of a lot better than I did,
too.  When Judith was little, I'm sure she thought of Annie as a
fairy-tale character, the kind who helps the princess, in the dark of
the night, sew a pile of golden garments out of straw.  Once she
presented Annie with her doll that had been lost all year in the field
up at the top of the garden; had weathered a whole winter there, its
pretty features bleached, its hair gone white, its clothes rotted
away-the snow, the rain, the mud had bled it blank.  She'd held it out
to Annie, wordless and tearful, one of those wrenching moments that're
only archetypal to you, not to your kid who's five and desperate-and
Annie gave us a long look over her shoulder.  "This is Lisa, right?" she
asked, and Judith gave her a big-eyed nod.  "Well, have you thought of
naming her Lazarus?" But she took the denuded Lisa from her and the next
week brought her back whole, healed, more beautiful than she had ever
been.  She had even, I remember, made little crimson slippers for Lisa's
toeless feet.  She was one of those people, Carolyn said, who touch
things into bloom.

In fact, that was her business: she had been a social worker in another
life, and had abandoned her dry-as-dust husband and, finally, men in
general, for women and perennials.  By now she'd landscaped every new
and renovated building in town, except for the ones whose owners
couldn't stand her.  "Flowers are nicer.  Bushes.  I prefer a cactus,
even, to a landlord.  They don't abuse children.  They don't beat each
other up, or lie, or lock their grandmother in the closet." She had just
had a client who did that, for the old lady's social-security check,
which she was made to endorse through the half-opened door.  That was
her last atrocity.  She bore too many grudges to be a social servant.

Now she stood in the middle of our kitchen in a bright fuchsia down
jacket that looked, I swear, like a freshly opened rose above the long
stalk of her legs.  "I'm not prepared to hear this," she said simply.
She looked from Carolyn's eyes to mine, hard.  "You are telling me
true."

"Too true," Carolyn said.  "This would be a hell of a thing to joke
about."

"But what are you actually telling me?"

I sighed.  "Don't know."

"But he is not violent," Carolyn said sternly.  "I know that.  He does
not inflict anything-physical-on anyone.  Yelling maybe.  A little
adolescent stubbornness.  Benign."

Annie let air out very slowly and noisily.  "Your boy has a temper."

Carolyn closed her eyes against that.  "No diagnoses, Annie.  Where is
he is our only question right now."

"You said you called Wendell.  Is he going to be able to handle this?"

"Too soon, too soon." I said that, angrily.  "Who says there's anything
to handle?  We're not giving him up to this yet."

Annie, whose energy level was higher, even, than mine-Carolyn calls us
the Ritalin Twins-cracked her knuckles impatiently, the way I don't let
my kids crack theirs.  She paced.  Her color was high with anger or with
the heat of the woodstove.  "Your son," she said specifically to
Carolyn, "is your husband under a bushel, I hope you know that." She
unzipped her jacket in a swoop.  "God, I'm steaming!" She fanned herself
with her bare hand.  "No, really.  He's his father with a gag on.  A
capped volcano.  Bad news."

"Gee, Annie," I said, "thanks a bunch.  I didn't know how much you loved
me."

"No secret, is it, darlin'?"

"Did you come up here to be helpful?" I asked.  "Or do you have to do a
bloody psychiatric intake review before we can talk?"

She quieted herself grudgingly.  "I'm sorry, dear.  There's no sense
speculating, is there?  What can I do to help you?" She gave herself the
look of a rebuked child.  "Carolyn?"

Carolyn looked angry at both of us.  She hugged herself, as if nobody
else could do it satisfactorily-true enough just then.  "Nothing." She
thought hard.  "Sometimes you could restrain yourself a little, Ann.

For the sake of the rest of us." She closed her hands against her
sweatered upper arms and squeezed hard.  It was probably comfortable to
hold handfuls of herself like that, as tight as if she were someone
else.  "Nothing," she said again.  "I'm sorry.  Ben?  Don't you agree?

Nothing?  Nothing?  Nothing?"

I went into the woods then, if not to scream at least to get free of the
dead air and the out I fsynch vibes between me and Carolyn.  I don't
like to talk about vibes, that's adolescent, and outdated at that.

But sometimes that's what you feel-the close fit, on a good day, between
word and need feels literal, physical, an alignment of thought waves. Or
the clangor in the air when everything you say grates on the other, and
the bad fit seems to start down deep, in the cut of your primary cells,
nothing congruent, nothing easy.

I put my skis on.  First I went through the whole long tedious waxing,
for once not impatient but grateful for something truly brainless, so
automatic and basic that I could do it without the slightest engagement
of the higher brain.  I rubbed on the wax in deep thrusts-this is
old-fashioned, in the day of non-wax skis, but I'm both poor and
conservative when it comes to my sensual pleasures-and then I lit the
torch to melt in the wax and held it close and heard the little sigh of
the propane flame-oh God, to be alive like the flame, it wasn't fair, it
wasn't possible they were taking that lovely girl and sealing up that
box that held her and putting it in the hold under the cemetery, the
winter vault, to wait until the thaw to lower her into the earth, and my
flesh, my blood, had made it happen?  I refused.  I simply refused.

The torch singed the outer edge of the left ski-I shook the wood and saw
it had just blackened the fine knife-edge where it begins its forward
curve, seared it rough, and I told myself to pay attention before I set
my house on fire.

I carried them through the back door, out of balance the way they always
are, tipping and knocking against the door frames, and clamped them on,
and then I took off, too desperate, pushing too hard, to move out of
myself into speed, into air.  Of course it soothed me finally.

When I got onto the good path through the flat, the tiny branches, shiny
with ice, whipping at my face from the bushes on both sides, I went
almost joyfully around the curves and down the one singing long hill, my
poles up, the skis knifing into new snow with a hiss.  Of course I felt
free of it for a couple of blessed minutes.  But then I was at the
bottom of the long hill, where the ash trees cluster like a pack of
gossips in a ring.

Just beyond them there is a beech-more than one, actually, two wound
around each other, neither dominant, neither dwarfed, bareskinned the
way beeches are, like a couple writhing in sexual agony.

I've always thought that, anyway; have taken their photograph like a
voyeur, from inside their weird embrace, from outside and all around
their snaking, bound-together limbs.  They stood there now as if I had
sought them, a silver-gray shining with moisture that looked like a fine
sweat.  I don't think it was self-pity that made me lay my cheek against
their bark, it was pity for Martha, for Mike and Terry Taverner who were
having to give her up so soon, for Jacob, my small son who had
grown-maybe, maybe not-into a terrifying stranger, a scourge who had
done an unthinkable thing, for Judith and Carolyn and for myself too,
why not for myself, but mostly for Jacob.  It was all that pity for all
those separate selves.  What could I do with it all but plant my skis in
a wide awkward V around the huge double trunk and lean my cheek against
the tree, and wait and wait to be comforted.

Was he walking around Harvard Square looking like another hip kid?

It was like a slightly thinned I ut Calcutta there, a claustrophobic
bazaar of the affluent, the crowds pressing anonymously around you,
people handing you fliers for jazz clubs, nails shops, selfdefense
classes, half the kids still and forever scruffy, in khakis and hair
that called attention to itself by extreme length or shortness or color
or wild and monstrous shape.  Maybe he was there passing as a Harvard
kid or a hanger-on.  Or walking in the Combat Zone, peering into the sex
clubs, at the photos of the naked girls with their eyes blacked out.

Everyone in that part of town looked hunted.

Partly it was being a mother, partly it was being a doctor who lived
for, put all her sentiment into, the welfare of children-every moment of
her life, it seemed, was devoted to making children comfortable,
lessening their pain or keeping it from happening in the first place.

She sat staring across the plants on the wide windowsill of the kitchen,
fixed on the bird feeder that sagged from the little sycamore.  They
didn't bother, in fact they didn't dare, to fill it anymore, because
Snappy the cat went up and dragged out the birds, and then they
discovered the squirrels that patrolled and menaced, digging the fallen
seeds out of the snow, walking upside down on the electric wire and
leaping onto the branch, any old way to get to the feeder: they weren't
buying seed to keep the squirrels fed.  Then the cat brought in a
squirrel carcass, opened, pink inside like a skinned chicken breast. Red
in tooth and claw, everywhere you looked.  She refused to think of him
little, being soothed, powdered, patted.  She saw him pulling on his
current ski jacket-he had a sharp black one with red and yellow stripes
in which she could see he felt expansive, mysterious, a little sinister.
Last summer, diving off a rock at Skaggs Pond, his stomach concave, his
elbows sharp.  Boy.  Boy at the ragged edge of manhood.  She saw him
trying to be fierce, to see if he could actually be cruel, and to stop
herself from remembering him helpless and tiny.

Motherhood didn't keep.  Why didn't more people admit it, that each
phase was succeeded so totally by the next (if you were concentrating as
hard as you had to) that sometimes she had trouble believing she'd been
there.  Their infancy was a rumor, distant, prodded by photographs and a
few tapes-Judith had a lisp, Jacob giggled incessantly, gulping breath;
he hiccuped a lot, she used to worry about him, because he took in so
much air.  She was astonished to hear them talking to each other on the
tapes, singing their songs: these were the voices of someone else's
children.

And then there were the videos, literal and abrupt, but they missed all
the early years.  And Jacob was better documented than Judith-the first,
and they were somehow less busy then-but neither was sufficiently whole
in her own unaided memory.  It was a cheat.  And she had begun to
realize recently, especially as she watched her parents arrive in their
seventies and eighties, that her whole life would fade the same way: a
distant image, no more immediate than a good-at best a good-movie.  If
she concentrated as hard as she could, she might see something like
snapshots.  But memory, blood-memory, was overrated; in books it was too
sharp, too clear and continuous.  In fact, everything was shadow.  The
past was only an abstract idea broken into by little shards of clear
image no longer than TV sound bites.

Cheat, cheat, cheat.

She had been appalled when she was a teenager to watch how her cat
failed to recognize her own kittens when they passed a certain age, or
feel for them.  The cat was a beautiful black longhair named Scumbles,
and her mothering was so natural, her devotion so profound and complex,
that Carolyn had been rapt with admiration.  Watching the new mother
moving her kittens, jerking them up by their damp scruffs and delivering
them squealing to fresh hiding places for reasons no human could fathom,
she was happy to think of herself as an animal, too.  It was ennobling
to be even distantly related to this loving, warming, protective little
creature who, uninstructed, huddled around her five babies who were as
small as thumbs, and licked them till they glistened.

But it was only a few months before she'd discovered Scumbles hissing
viciously at her own half-grown babies like a stranger; she had grown
territorial, and selfish about her food.  Unsentimental!  Carolyn had
protested.  How could she not feel the connection forever?  How could
she not know their smell and love it?  Well, maybe if she saw him she
could recover that connection.  Maybe if she put her arms around him and
remembered.  But the boy she'd held against her, had scooped up off the
ground and balanced on her hip, had carried in his sleep, was gone
anyway; that wasn't the one she'd have if he stood in the doorway right
now.  The cat she'd have was a grown one who scented his fur with
after-shave, deodorant, and mousse to disguise the smell his mother
might claim as hers.  A cat who did what he wanted to.  A Tom.

She put her head on her folded arms and wept.

Sometimes they were a good team; there was a lot between them.

When their father got harsh, or did some of the humiliating things he
did-clowning too much at school when he was painting that mural with the
kids, or arguing at town meeting so that everybody's parents laughed at
him, or writing to the newspaper-or when their mother got tense and
nasty, or too tired to pay attention-those were the times they got
together and helped each other out.  They had certain looks they
exchanged that reminded them they knew what was going on, and trusted
that it would pass; they had little routines, murmurings, and reminders
of the day they this and the night they that.  No one but family could
share those things; they were too insignificant even to mention to
friends, or expect that they'd understand.

There were other things, too.  Once Judith let Jacob hide some money in
her room that his friend Jackie wasn't supposed to have.  He said,
"You're good at not asking any questions, right?" and she was so
flattered she said yes, sure, even though she knew something was wrong.
She never told a lot of little things she happened to know, how Jacob
wasn't always exactly where he said he was going to be, or with the
people he said he'd be with.  Maybe she knew more than she should, but
he was her major fascination and always had been, and she made it a
hobby-something more than a hobby-to follow him with her eyes and ears,
to sleuth around and then memorize and swallow what she found.

And there was one more thing, or used to be.  Sometimes she thought it
was terrible and other times it was perfectly natural because he was her
brother, a part of her life from her very first minute, but she wasn't
admitting it to anyone, so no one could give her an opinion.  One night
when their parents went out and left them home, Jacob in charge-this
must have been when she was about eight or nine and he was maybe
thirteen, maybe a little less-and she had gone to take a bath, somehow
he had come into the bathroom while she was getting her nightgown on. He
had looked a little shy about it but he had asked her some questions
about her body: what exactly, up close, certain places looked like, and
they had prodded with very earnest curiosity at each other's hidden
parts.  She didn't mind his inspection of her-she was clean from the
bath, the air was fogged with baby powder-and her parents had both told
her endlessly, even tediously, how natural and beautiful "the body"
was-funny formal word for the plain skin she walked around in.

Jacob had seemed very respectful of what he found; he didn't touch her
at all, only asked, with the scientific gravity of their
mother-thedoctor, if she'd show him what she looked like inside.  She
had never thought of herself as mysterious, but she supposed if you
didn't have any experience being a girl you wouldn't even quite know how
many holes they had, and where, and why.  (Why she wasn't clear about
herself.  She wasn't exactly sure which one a baby came out of either,
though she had a hunch.) And then, part of the deal, she got to look at
him.  She had peed squatting next to Mickey Geyer when she was four, and
had discovered he had an advantage in the matter and didn't get his
shoes wet.  She had sort of seen what he peed out of, and had caught
various glimpses of her brother through the years-it was easier to see
what boys had than girls-but a close-up view was a wonder.  She found it
off-putting, this odd protuberance that was a different color and a
different texture than the rest of him.  It was essentially silly, like
a small pink animal, or something you'd find at the aquarium curled up
on a sea rock, with a single off-center eye.  "Don't touch," Jacob had
warned her, "or it'll scare you."

"What do you mean?" She fixed her deepest concentration on it.

"I'll show you next time," her brother said.  "It can do a trick." He
had glanced, all through these investigations, at the door; had clearly
been listening for the premature return of their parents.

"Why do you keep looking out there?" she asked.  "They wouldn't get mad
if they saw us."

"Want to bet?" Jacob asked, and he pulled up his jeans and buttoned and
zipped them contemplatively, as if he was still thinking about what he
had seen.  He was such a contradiction even then, half polite and
thoughtful, and halfa little crazy with energy and flippancy.  He called
the hidden thing "Batman."

"They always say your body is good and nothing about it is dirty."

Anyway, it couldn't be dirty after a bath, she thought gratefully.

"Yeah," he said.  "But we're really not supposed to show each other,
people who are related are like-it's not decent."

"Well, I don't know why." She wondered why he hadn't gone to someone
else then, a friend or a girl in his class.  Of course, it made more
sense to come to her; she didn't believe a stranger would have been
better.  She didn't know what was wrong and she couldn't wait to see his
trick.

Their parents didn't leave them home again for a few weeks; Judith was
tormented with curiosity.  What could a soft rubbery thing do for a
trick?  Maybe he could pull it inside altogether, into that thin fluff
of dark hair at the top, the way turtles could hide their heads.  Maybe
it had to do with those jiggly little bags in the back that were covered
with gooseflesh as if they were cold.  She was distracted and impatient
and took to staring at the boys in her class when she could do it
unobtrusively.  They all carried that mystery hidden there in darkness.

This movable mushroom that lolled its head this way and that, invisible,
was much more peculiar than what she had that didn't actually do
anything.

Batman emerged into light one night when their parents had driven into
Howe to see a visiting ballet company.  It was a snowy night and she was
afraid they might not go; both of them stood at the front hall window
watching the lights of the car poke through the cold mist and wondered
how long they ought to wait, just to be sure their mother hadn't
forgotten the tickets or her purse or something .  .

Then Jacob took his pants off altogether, signaling that they would not
be rushed or anxious this time.  He left his blue Michael Jackson
T-shirt on, belling out at the waist like a tent.  Then, in its shadow,
he took her hand and closed it around himself.  His eyes were
odd-excited but strangely distant, as if he wasn't here with her but was
somewhere else, seeing someone, or maybe no one, but not Judith, not his
little sister.  He closed his hand over hers tightly, the way her
teacher used to do in penmanship, and moved it up and down, hard, and
faster and faster, and Judith, alarmed, felt something live inside her
grip.  It flailed like their guinea pig when he was out of his cage and
frightened.  It was trying to escape.  Once he opened her hand so that
she could see and she understood the trick-Batman had been changed into
something else entirely, a different shape and size, a different color.
A magician's egg.

Finally, when she had had about enough of this urgent friction, Jacob
shouted and bucked as if he was trying to get away and his head fell
back alarmingly.  He bared his teeth and his braces glinted in the small
light of his bedroom lamp.  He was in pain, she had hurt him without
meaning to, and she was about to apologize when she saw that she was in
possession of a handful of phlegm, and that was when she ran out of his
room, close to gagging.  She ran, waving her hand wildly to get it off
her, down the stairs and out the front door, as if the house were on
fire.  He did not follow her.  She went out onto the front path in her
sock feet, and the bottom of her nightgown got sopping wet blotting up
the snow.  She stayed outside until it got too cold, and then she came
in and went directly to her room and closed the door.  She had rubbed
her hand in the fresh snow the way she'd scrape her shoe when she'd
picked up dog I o, but she could still see an odd filmy web, like
leftover egg white, dried into the Iifelines on her palm.

For a week Judith thought her brother too gross to be approached without
averting her eyes.  Compared to boys, she was grateful to be inanimate
and unchanging.  It took her a very long time to face him -not to
forgive him exactly, because she couldn't decide whether to pity or to
hate him for his disgusting trick-but when she settled it in her mind it
was only because it was easier to spread the blame for the whole bizarre
episode than to hold him responsible.  She had to assume every boy could
do this; maybe they grew out of it.  But now she could understand why he
worried that their parents would discover them.  The boy who ate his
breakfast at the table beside her, and read his biology essay out loud
(The Venus-Flytrap and Other Carnivorous Plants), and seemed to harbor
no visible agitation in his lap when they sat side by side in the back
seat of the car-it was impossible that he so calmly possessed Batman and
kept him in check, but it had to be true, unless it had all been a bad
dream brought on by her parents absence on a dangerous evening of cold
and snow.  She was not, however, inclined to such dreams.

It wasn't long afterwards that her mother told her about babies, in an
explanation that wasn't easy to convert to images-people loving each
other and then lying down on each other, she had seen that sort of thing
in movies-but she wasn't eager to think Jacob's magic was a part of
that.  Did that mean she could have started a baby doing what they did?
Did it hurt to do what her mother was suggesting everybody did?  She
remembered her brother's voice, his eyes, his helpless moan, her flight
into the snow.  She did not tell anyone, not even her best friend,
Celeste, who had only sisters.  Celeste had a wicked crush on Jacob, but
if she heard about this she would never be able to look him in the eye
again.

But he had been different in the last year or so.  Sometimes she found
it hard to believe they had ever played together those incessant
stranded hours of country children: had made snow forts, bonfires,
five-minute dramas in full ridiculous costume, Jacob bossing; throwing
their brown-and-white Frisbee that looked like an Oreo.  Jacob had
characters with crazy voices like the Ancient Mariner, an old creep who
kept grabbing you when he wanted to talk and then running off at the
mouth about boring complicated movie plots that never were.  If you
could pinch him, his voice would disappear.  There was Mr.  Q., who was
the exact opposite of Mr.  T., a little wimp who made Woody Allen look
like Superhulk.  He always talked about his adventures getting sand
kicked in his face, having his girl stolen away by surfer dudes.  Judith
thought Jacob should make movies or write books when he grew up-the best
he would promise was that he'd never get a job where he had to wear a
suit and tie.  "Not even a basketball coach?"

she asked him.  "That," he allowed, "I'd have to think about."

But he had begun to develop what she called Dragon's Breath.

Actually, what she thought of when he turned it on her were the scenes
in The Invasion of the Body Snatchers when the people who have been
taken-they still look normal but they are working for "the other
side"-stare at their victims, open their mouths, and out comes a roar
like fire, not a voice really but a gruesome hollow sucking sound: wind
through the tunnel to hell.

The first time she heard it he had roared so loud he woke her out of a
sound sleep.  She heard his outraged voice all the way up the stairs,
and heard her father's matching shout.  They were in the kitchen.  She
stood on the stairs in the living room, bent over toward them, trying to
discover what the argument was about.  His hours again.  It was two or
three in the morning.  Jacob's hours out with his friends, and maybe
what they did while they were out together; between what she couldn't
hear and what she couldn't comprehend she missed the gist of it, but
they sounded as if they might come to blows.

But they didn't.  She saw their exhausted faces when they trooped past
her up to bed, first her mother's (who had hardly been heard from, or
else had spoken in a voice too quiet to carry a room away), white and
silent; then her father's, still red, sweat standing out on his beard
like snowflakes, his chest heaving; finally Jacob, the victim and cause
of the conflagration.  He had passed over into another phase by now: he
was wearing his coolest, most impassive face.  He looked to Judith,
standing aside to let them pass, like a blind man.  He looked as if he
had seen nothing, heard nothing, had been involved only accidentally in
some great passion that didn't affect him, not really.

She admired the suavity of that look, its remove, its superiority to the
moment (though hadn't she just heard him shouting so fiercely his voice
broke like a child's?).  But he had stopped as if he'd kicked into a
different phase; his rage had turned serene.  When he came up to her
(now she had fled to the top of the stairs), he put out his hand and
tweaked her in the stomach without cracking a smile.  How she loved
him-his control, his conviction of his innocence.  Her father looked
foolish beside him, like a man who had run after a bus, shouting at it,
banging on its door, left standing, finally, on the empty curb.

After a few minutes she went to Jacob's room to congratulate him, but
she stopped short.  He was smashing at his closet door with his bare
hand, brutally, grunting as if each blow he landed were injuring
someone.  His Led Zeppelin poster was deeply gouged, its margin in
shreds.  Blood from his knuckles blossomed onto its white ground.  She
stood behind the door where he couldn't see her.  Finally he stopped and
cradled one elbow with his other hand, so that he could rock on his
heels and suck on his mutilated fist.  She saw in his tear-distorted
face how much that yelling and then that control, that blind man's
remove, had cost him.  His own blood ran down his fingers to his wrist.

What had he been doing all night that had been worth this?

Now she lay in her bed, warm in her nightgown though it was noon, trying
to comprehend what was happening.  He was gone and maybe they would
catch him and shoot him down.  She watched him running right past his
breakfast, making for the school bus.  She was always standing calmly
beside the mailbox when he came charging out of the house just as the
yellow bus peeked over the top of the hill.  Or he'd get there when Nat
was already closing the doors and jump on and give Nat a high-five,
laughing.  A lot of her recent memories of Jacob were accompanied by the
choking smell of exhaust and the huge exhalation of breath of the
closing bus door, that pneumatic releaser that Nat held in his big
gloved hand.  "You're shavin' it closer every time, Jake," Nat would
say, amused, not angry.  "One of these days you're gonna have to catch
hold of the rear bumper."

But that was before he could drive.  She wished he had never learned.

They argued over the car the most: "If you want your own car that much,
get a job.  Save for it." That was their father's refrain, even though,
as Jacob loved to point out, you wouldn't think an artist would be more
of a tight-ass than those regular dads who worship the Chamber of
Commerce.  "A lot of good it does us that he has all these crazies in
his head," Jacob would mutter.  "He's the biggest capitalist on wheels."
Their mother took a softer line; she didn't care about money.

"What's ours is yours, I don't have to tell you that," she always said
consolingly.  Maybe that was because her mother and father were rich-it
just didn't matter to her.  Over their father's objections she bought
him the old Dodge, cheap, when a custodian at the hospital died-Jacob
called it the Curse for the first few months.  He had to buy his own
insurance, his gas, pay for repairs.

Once their mother caught him with some of her money-twenties right out
of her purse.  There was another one of those family rages that time,
but Jacob was taking a new tack: instead of shrieking back, he doused
his Dragon Breath first thing and went right into that silence.

Judith watched him blown backward in the rush of their father's fury,
like someone standing in the invisible wash of an airplane motor.  But
all he did was narrow his eyes in the wind.  His defense now was to say
nothing.  His cheeks worked-a little insect of a vein batted against his
skin, trapped, trying to get out, but he wouldn't open his mouth to let
it escape.

"Aren't you going to answer me?" their father shouted.  Three twenty I
ollar bills flapped in his grip.  Judith, though she'd heard about his
crime, was horrified to actually see them-he really had taken them out
of his mother's wallet, had dared to reach uninvited into the intimacy
of her bag that smelled of cinnamon sugarless and remove them like a
pickpocket, a stranger!

Jacob was not going to answer, he was going to wait him out, but his
father took him by the back of his corduroy shirt and held him there as
if he was about to lift him right off the ground; he tried to catch his
son's gaze.  They waited in silence.  Surely someone was going to get
tired.  It was Jacob, finally, who said in a bleached-sounding voice,
"You've got the bills, you've got the evidence.  What more do you want?"
He kept his eyes on his mother, who somehow looked more guilty than he
did.

Judith knew what her father wanted, what every father seemed to: an
apology.  You could get them off you if you didn't mind giving up your
dignity.  He wanted to know he was powerful and respected and even if
you stopped respecting him for demanding it, the loss was apparently
worth it.  Even at twelve Judith knew that, though he tended to be a lot
gentler with her.  She loved her father, of course, but she was thrilled
at Jacob's solidarity with his own needs.

His muffler was shot, he had told her, as if that justified everything.

It was making so much noise Roger-the I p had stopped him at the bottom
of the hill and warned him he was giving him a ticket next time. "You're
disturbing the peace," he had told him.  "If you don't fix that in a
week, your name's going in the paper in the Court Proceedings and you're
putting twenty-five bucks in my pocket for pollution and another
twenty-five for sounding like a DC-10." A ticket was such a waste of
cash he was extra I areful never to speed, even though his friends
called him chicken.  "I'm going to die without ever getting a ticket,"
he boasted.  "Let them laugh, their money's gonna line Roger's uniform
pockets and I'm gonna get a good tape deck.  Let's see who laughs then."

That was when he got a job, after school and weekends, at the Arbor
Nursery.  He wrestled trees with their roots in burlap and watered,
pruned, and planted, as gentle with the seedlings as a vet with new
kittens.  He talked to them, sang them songs, especially slow ones,
ballads.  When Judith bicycled out to see him there once, he gave her a
violet in a pot, a beautiful purple called Ballerina.  "Are you sure
it's okay to give this to me?" she asked him.  There were pinks and
whites, their leaves like fancy velvet, ranged under fluorescent lights.
She thought she might start a collection in her window.

"There's a lot more gone from here than a three-inch violet, kiddo," he
said to her, looking all around as he said it.  His open level gaze, his
competent hands and good manners, and especially the way he sang James
Taylor over the moist flats, that sad song about sweet dreams and flying
machines, guaranteed that no one suspected.  He took the metal hanger
off a fuchsia plant and attached it to the rim of the green pot that
held her violet.  She pedaled home trying to hum "Fire and Rain," with
the little Ballerina dangling from her handlebars, waving in its fringes
of purple, the ultimate never-before never-again bike ornament.

She called the office.  "What are you doing, Karen?"

Karen breathed out a little puff of surprise.  "Doing?  You mean, like,
am I filing charts or doing my nails?"

"I mean, is there any-is anyone there?  Are they canceling?"

Karen laughed bleakly.  "Well.  There's a kind of hush in the office,
I'd say.  Your appointments-a few people called.  Most just didn't show.
A couple came in yesterday and wanted to know where you were.  News
doesn't penetrate under every rock, I guess."

She felt foolish putting the question to Karen, but Karen was the one
who was sitting, right now, in the seat of knowledge.  "What do you
think-what would-if I came in this afternoon, what do you think I'd
find?"

Karen was silent a long time.  "Oh, Carolyn." (She had never called
Carolyn "Doctor." Carolyn appreciated that.)  "Some folks have been very
nice.  I mean, they're sort of-haven't people been calling to give you
their support?"

"A few.  Yes, actually, a good number, I suppose.  But those are
friends, of course.  And a few nasty ones mixed in."

"Well, I mean, people are mostly being decent here.  They're giving a
lot of 'benefit of the doubt." But-God, I don't know.  The Bugler's out,
did you see that?"

Carolyn closed her eyes.  Wendell had brought the newspaper up to them.
The lead story mentioned Jacob, careful to add that the police wanted
him for questioning; it did not call him a suspect.  On page 2, at the
top of the obituaries for eighty-two-year I ld farmers and
ninetythree-year I ld nursing home favorites was a picture of Martha in
a white blouse, smiling like anyone's daughter.  The picture was o I
viously a year or two old; she looked like a member of the church choir.
That had knocked the wind out of Carolyn, the dumb mechanical neutrality
of the camera that had no powers of prophecy, that showed the world as
it had been, not as it would be.  The obituary did an absurd dance
around the facts: the girl "died Wednesday in Hyland," it said, but then
it threw the ball back at the reader: "(See story, p.  I)." There was a
picture, grainy to the point of unintelligibility, of the split-rail
fence in front of Tuttle's field where she had been found.  All you
could see in the picture were shadows in the snow-scuff marks?  Tire
tracks?  It was a stupid, meaningless photograph of the fenders of
police cars and the festive ribbons they put up to quarantine crime
sites, but Carolyn's stomach rose to her chest when Wendell shook out
the paper and laid it in front of her.

"You saw it?" Karen asked again.

Carolyn closed her eyes.  "The Bugler is not a court of law."

"Oh, I didn't mean it was," fraren answered hastily.  "Only it-sort of
spreads the air of suspicion around.  Sort of." It was clear what she
was trying to say.  "I just don't want you to be out there where people
can hurt your feelings, that's all.  I mean-they're not always as
thoughtful as they could be.  And some people never learned any tact
even if they're trying to be nice."

Someone had told Karen that morning that she'd be afraid to let Carolyn
put her hands on her little boy.  Why?  Karen had asked her, and smiled
as icily as she could.  You think she's murdered anyone lately?  The
woman had given her a terrible look and rushed away, pushing her child
ahead of her as if they were fleeing contagion.  She said to Carolyn,
"Maybe you just want to do a couple of hours and feel things out.
There's a lot of weeding and sorting to do in the files, too, that I
know you've been wanting to find time for."

When she told Ben she was going in, he said brusquely, as if it were a
betrayal, "Your funeral." His face reddened.  This was like being around
the dying-you lost half your vocabulary.

"For one thing, it's an admission of guilt to stay in quarantine.  Jacob
is missing."

He only looked at her, a little owl I yed.

"Anyway"-she thought for a moment and then went on-"do we have no
existence outside our son's behavior?"

Ben's eyes flashed at her.  Again she thought of an owl she had
encountered one early evening, walking in the woods in summer.  The
white ruff of his feathers had been so proud and plumped that he seemed
aggressive doing nothing but sitting on a branch looking down.

He had leveled a cold glare at her, slicing the air between them, all
silver edge like a scimitar.  "That's an astonishing thing for a
grownup, presumably sane and functioning person to say under these
circumstances," he told her with an abashing coldness.  He went on
staring, as if some horrible secretion were flowing from her mouth,
coursing down her chin.  "Maybe it would be best to pretend you never
said that."

Was she losing her bearings?  What was so terrible about saying that she
would not feel reduced to nothing by this "suspicion" the newspaper had
not even spoken of?  (For a few days running, Nat the schoolbus driver
had been kind enough to honk for Judith when he didn't find her at her
post beside the mailbox.  Certainly he knew she wasn't home with the
sniffles-Nat knew everything.  Bless him, he was not assuming she'd
taken cover.)  She thought her decision to go to work showed great
confidence in Jacob; some people, at least, would recognize and respect
it.  Or, meanwhile, all her knowledge-swellings, symptoms, her hands'
capabilities, her diagnostic sensitivity-what was supposed to happen to
it?  If they needed her before, didn't they need her now?  This all felt
like an endless snow day, everything closed, obligations suspended,
while they watched the world suffocated under a chill white down
comforter.  They had had crises when, because the pump was electric and
the wires were sunk under heavy snow, they couldn't even flush the
toilets, let alone turn on the lights.  The house had begun to feel like
that by now: the air was turning rancid and they were out of
conversation.  She sat looking at Ben, who sat looking at nothing,
poking at his absoluteness, turning over his anger, formulating,
finally, her own plans.  She was still Dr.  Reiser, damn him.

She loved her child and she loved her town, but she was still a person
with some value and some function and she would not cut it off in the
shadow of this innuendo.  Damn them all.

She had to drive through town to get to the hospital.  From up the hill,
the roofs, still dusted with snow, were like cakes under a sifting of
confectioner's sugar.  This view always stopped her cold, it was so
idyllic and yet so protective of its own: the picture-postcard village,
best seen at Christmas, everyone inside and the streets silent.  There
were such nineteenth-century postcards, in fact, in the Historical
Society, etchings of snug houses behind their fences, lacy carpenter's
gothic hung from the eaves, wreaths on the doors.

Up close, Hyland was waking; it did that early, in the spirit of the
farmers who used to milk their cows before dawn.  There weren't many
farms around any more, only the Josses' tawny cows out Route 48-Joe Joss
worked at the optical factory but he kept the farm and his wife ran the
farmstand-and a herd of spotted Holsteins way at the far end of Camp
Road, lolling and lowing among the stones of a lush green field.  But
those were a gentleman farmer's cattle, not the real thing.  The townies
always said, Cows like that, their shit don't smell.  Those folks want
to feed their petunias, they got to buy fertilizer in a bag just like
the rest of us.  They like a dirt road in spite of the mud and dust,
1789 over the doorway.  They drink wine that looks like ginger ale, and
they don't eat beef.

Still, there were folks up early, parked in front of Doreen's on Main
Street, truckers, retailers who liked to open their stores before nine
to get a jump on, and just plain Calvinists who believed you ought to
turn out of bed before the sun came in the window.  (Somehow their creed
allowed them breakfast they had to pay for, and they didn't even mind
leaving the tip.)  They were sitting at the counter or spread out in the
tall old wooden booths nobody would let Doreen replace with plastic,
their heavy jackets hanging at the corners.  Speculating, probably,
laying odds: guilty I not guilty.  Everyone liked Doreen's crullers and
coffee sticks, but there were more of the Taverners' friends than theirs
inside.  Dip and sip, the sign said over the counter.  Sometimes the
lawyers came in, and the judge who worked out of the Town House across
the street, dipping and sipping with everybody else.

Ben loved it down there, and sometimes he had a second breakfast with
the same folks he played poker with: Rudy, who cleaned chimneys, and
Sam, who sold insurance but liked art, liked Ben's sculptures.

(Once he bought his wife a little vase he called "junk flowers" for her
birthday, nuts and bolts and a couple of sprung springs.)  Their
straightforwardness was what Ben loved; their good sense, their hatred
of pretension.  A deep I yed thriftiness, a refusal to show off.  The
way their kids stayed around, lived in town forever.  He hoped Jacob
would stay around, too, go off to college but come back; he wanted
Judith to settle up the road, when the time came, the way their
neighbors' children did, and brought their babies around for daily
loving.

Well, he was right.  She didn't fancy the regulation life of the Boston
suburbs, where every kitchen had the same sleek appliances and every
yard the same Sunday garden.  They liked the proportion of green to
concrete here, and simple to elegant.  Last bastion of.  .  .  what?
Not na1vet I , not even decency, nobody had a corner on that.
Responsibility?  It was a place where what you did got credited to your
account, good or bad.  It stayed with you, on your record.  Celene, of
course, who grew up here, thought that was the worst thing going: you
could get away with nothing.  With less than you had done.  Social
determinism, she said.  Save me!  But she had gone away, met her big I
ity husband, and come back.  I like to know the players on the
scorecard, she said.  I like my kids to know who to call if I ever leave
them stranded.

I don't want them afraid of strangers.

Carolyn hoped there was someone in Doreen's this morning to speak up for
not knowing.

When she got out of her car, walking shakily across the ice-impacted
parking lot, somebody waved from a distance.  There, she thought, and
then was horrified that since the last time she'd parked here she had
been reduced to gratitude for an idle gesture.

A few mothers trickled in with their children.  They tried to ignore the
tension, like actors with little conviction trying to breathe life into
a bad script.  A few others came forth with sympathy that felt like
condolence.  She bobbed her head in acknowledgment, thanked them, and
returned to the child at hand-she cut off a splint, did a throat
culture, gave a newborn his shots and soothed his howling.  She thought
every mother looked at her with exaggerated attention, but she was
probably wrong.

Nonetheless, by late afternoon she had a throbbing headache.  A nurse
she knew only slightly, a white-haired, sweet-faced woman recently
returned from retirement, put her head around the door jamb just as
Carolyn was passing-she must have been crouched, waiting -and said
almost cheerfully and without preamble, "They ought to take a razor to
his you-know-what, your son.

Carolyn stared, open-mouthed.  The woman had vanished.  She would have
some response ready next time, she would have a shield to hold up,
indifference or her own anger or just the inability to be surprised. She
would not allow herself to be ambushed again.

Only Karen managed to strike the right note, or combination of notes.
She was brisk and unsentimental on the one hand, and protective on the
other, as if to question her instincts were to call into question the
natural order.  Carolyn heard her saying into the phone, with a perfect
balance of unrancorous politeness and a strong suggestion of unofficial
disappointment, "Well, thanks for calling, Mrs.  Weber, and not just
being a n I show.  We can certainly use your appointment time." Though,
of course, there was no one at all to use it.  "I can understand you
might be uncomfortable-yes-but I personally don't think you need to be.
The doctor is going about her business here.

Oh yes, certainly.  Well, why not, after all?" A pause for incredulity.

"Okay, thanks for your honesty, Mrs.  Weber.  Be well." She turned to
Carolyn, who was plucking files from the carefully ordered shelves.

"Hypocrites.  Some of them are lovely, though, you've got to remember
that.  Don't think everybody's like that one.  Some people have gone out
of their way .  .  .  And they have all kinds of little memories of
things Jacob did for them.  Myra Vance said she never would have gotten
her little boy to step up on the school bus if Jacob hadn't protected
him, this was years ago and she was still grateful.  She said Jacob was
the only boy in the lot who wasn't afraid to be kind."

As if he were dead.  She hated the idea of being talked about, hated the
necessity of pulling those memories up from the well of years.  She
smiled and nodded and took her files into her office, where she sank
down on the corduroy couch and covered her mouth with her hand and
pressed tight, for fear she'd be sick and humiliated on top of
everything else.

One woman, a new patient, showed up with her eight-year-old, who had
swimmer's ear.  "Now, how," Carolyn asked, smiling, "has she managed to
get swimmer's ear in January?"

The mother laughed.  "Oh, we have an indoor pool.  Not here, this is
just our summer place and, you know, weekends.  We live in Boston.

Lexington, actually.  We're just here to ski."

Carolyn took another look.  The woman had a blond ponytail and wore high
heels with her slacks; they had a wavy white stain line around the sole
where the snow had lapped.  Her sweater was a fabulous hand-knitted
sphere of many colors, Italian, probably.  An indoor pool.

She wasn't up on local gossip much, then; she was here from Mars for the
skiing.

"I'm so glad we could get an appointment at the last minute," she said
and helped her daughter into her down jacket.  "You're usually so busy.
For a small town, I mean." Her daughter pulled her matching ponytail out
of her collar.  "But, whoo, it looks like a bomb hit your waiting room
today.  Well-lucky for us!" She folded her prescription down the middle
emphatically and asked whether her daughter's ear meant that the pool
was contaminated.

Carolyn stared after her.  This was the worst thing, she had seen it and
read about it but never felt it, the way everything stands like a cut I
ut against a blank background.  Shock, was it?  How everything was
blasted-voices echoed, tasteless and absurd, all platitude and hidden
insult and devious judgment.  Either the everyday world was unreal or
she was.  Or both.

Seeing the world from 30,000 ft.  There are more mountaIns in the 115
than my geography teacher ever told us.  Someone said I could get
tortilias made of blue corn out here!  Dad, you could get into th1s kind
of cooking.  I mean "cuisine."

"Cocina." Sleeping is hard.

I ingyou, J.

It was postmarked Albuquerque.  When Carolyn came home from work,
desperate for a drink, a bath, and the obliteration of an early bedtime,
she found Ben sitting at the kitchen table staring at it.  He had it
propped up against a bottle of mayonnaise and he sat facing it like a
man contemplating checkmate.

She read the card, then reached for the jar.  "Why is this here?"

"I don't know.  Tallest thing I could find to lean it against."

She snatched the jar away and took it to the refrigerator.  "It's not
good for it to be out of the refrigerator."

"Hey!  Is that all you can do?  What's the matter with you?" He waved
the card at her.  "This is Santa Fe." It showed a long file of Indian
women with their wares arranged on striped blankets against the front of
a building, a sort of galleria, open-sided.  Its arches were beautiful
hard stone, while under them sat this neat row of softcostumed women in
long braids.  "That's it?  That's your whole reaction?"

"It is."

She was walking around the kitchen quickly, tight-lipped.

"Where do you think he got the money to-"

"He slaughters someone-all right, maybe, maybe not, that's too harsh.
But he certainly knows what's going on here and he's writing cute notes
about corn chips and cookery."

"Carolyn-"

"He is-this is a psychopathic response, do you realize that?  The second
one.  That's what you're looking at, a serious form of insanity."

"No.  Psychopathic?  I don't even know what that is.  I see somebody
scared, haunted-look, he's not sleeping."

She slapped a potholder down on the counter for no particular reason. "I
should hope not.  But it doesn't look like he's given up eating, does
it?" The anger that crested behind her eyes was like no anger she had
felt for the small things of her life.  Was she supposed to worry that
he wasn't sleeping?  Somebody was sleeping, down there in the cemetery
hold, once and for all.  She realized how much comfort she'd been
taking, cold but comfort nonetheless, imagining him the victim.

Alive, of course alive, but desperate.  Blameless.

She couldn't find a way to let it out; if the ground weren't thick with
snow and the road still slick, she might go out and run for miles, then
turn around and run back and maybe mercifully fall into bed with her
brain burned out on cold and distance.  She was going to explode.  They
had the whole rest of their lives to live, and nowhere to spend this
fury, this movement, this frustration at not knowing.  It had never
occurred to her to think she was bad at "delay of gratification," that
was a patronizing term you used for ghetto teenagers who robbed
convenience stores to get enough money for gold chains and wild highs.
She had to be doing something, though: working, cleaning up, touching
something with her hands, her mind.  Her unspent energy, in another
minute, would smash against the wall and drip slowly down.

"I read the Bugler again," Ben said, coming toward her from another
side.

"We all read it together."

"They're only saying they want to question him.  That's important.

There's nothing in there about suspicion or anything." He looked so
complacent, sitting like a man waiting for his dinner.  Nothing was
cooking.

"Small favors.  That doesn't mean he's not a suspect.  It's just, I
don't know, conservative journalism."

"But kind of them," he insisted.  "They don't have to be kind.  There's
nothing incendiary in it."

"I guess.  But people think what they want to think.  The newspaper
doesn't have much to do with it." She saw the quick flash and retreat of
the sunny-faced nurse who wanted to take a razor to Jacob's privates.

She would spare Ben for now, but she realized, as she tucked the
abomination out of sight, that she had to face all that.  She lived in
an office crammed with the inflamed fantasies and vengeance of parents
terrified in every conceivable way for their children, while Ben sat up
here running his hands over the long, smooth limbs of his wooden
figures.  He walked around them studying them with the intentness she
gave difficult diagnoses, and what he came up with was the need to plane
another sixteenth of an inch off a forearm.  H I was as protected as a
child-they didn't cut him with their eyes, his statues, or whisper about
him, or threaten violence.  Then again, he was the one who had warned
her not to go: she had to grant him good instincts.  She sighed and
looked around.  "Where's Judith?"

"She went over to Kerry's.  I think she's ready to go back to school."

He hadn't asked about her day and she wasn't volunteering.  She had an
image of Jacob sitting in a restaurant right on the square in Santa Fe,
behind bright half curtains, dipping blue chips into chili.  He nibbled
a chip and gazed out on the square, where people were crossing back and
forth in the cold winter sun in a restless traffic.  She was afraid of
the look on his face, neither frightened nor worried nor crazed.

It was his ordinary everyday expression, which, if she could see it, she
knew, would bring her to her knees.  "No, she's not ready to go back,"
Carolyn said.  "Unless it's different with children.  But I suspect it
would only be worse." She thought of her empty office, the blond woman
and her daughter who said the waiting room looked like a bomb had hit
it.  Judith's face showed every blow, it was still new and soft and
undamaged.  She had the broad sweet forehead of an untested saint.
"Believe me."

Passing through.

I never thought it had I g to do with St.  Louis but here it is, real.
This is h I in the airport but I remember we saw it once at the
Smithsonian so what's going on?  Somebody's got a fake on their hands! I
also never thought I'd ever be in I'Iissouri.  I t that I know the
reason now.

Love, J.

The Spirit of St.  Douis dangled like a colossal insect over the airport
lobby, casting shadows.  The card had an old-fashioned look to it, a
matte, badly registered photo straight out of the forties, or earlier,
maybe; its edges were deckled like the photos in my parents' albums,
where everyone's young and the men wear bathing suits that cover their
chests.

Carolyn had gone to get the mail.  We weren't saying a whole lot to each
other, we were sitting in the house feeling blunted as if we'd both had
a swig of carbon monoxide, the way it steals up on you and you don't
know it but you're about to pass out.  At least that's how I felt.

She didn't look too keen either, but she kept trying to read novels,
pretending it was wonderful that she finally had a chance to relax a
little.  (Frankly, I thought it was slightly obscene even to fake satis
faction just now.  You'd think she had a bad cold that was keeping her
in bed for a few days, long enough to get a couple of Agatha Christies
under her belt.  But she doesn't know how to waste time, not even
mourning time.  She can't sit still.  Oh Lord, I kept remembering, teach
us to sit still.  Teach us, teach us, if it isn't too late.) God, I
remember when I was a kid and my parents, because they were Orthodox,
wouldn't answer the phone on Shabbos.  That particular prohibition used
to drive me completely berserk; questions of what you could or couldn't
eat didn't intrude much-I ate what my mother put in front of me.  And
when I was young enough I didn't mind praying or even studying-my
impatience with those came later, when I needed conscious conviction, a
sense of the center of it all, and couldn't find it.  But this was
different: the sun would set on Friday night and until it went down
again the next night I was expected to accept that the world simply
didn't exist.  There it was, you could walk through it, it could knock
you down if you weren't careful crossing the street, other people did
their shopping or they went to the movies in it, while we sat pretending
everything was at rest.  But in fact all that would happen to me was
that, instead of calm, a gigantic tension would mount up inside my
chest; it defeated all my father's intentions.

The phone would ring and ring and go on ringing and I'd sit there with
my hands under me and I'd twitch with the tension of being there and not
being there.  It was like being an ostrich.

So one day, on a morning when my father was in shul and for some reason
I was home-I probably had a sniffle and my mother was making a
preemptive strike against pneumonia-the phone had been ringing and
ringing and I had terrible fantasies about something.  Prob ably
something worthy, knowing me at that age: my grandfather was in the
nursing home by then, very old and frail, and I was sure they were
calling to tell us he was dying, that he'd died, and we'd missed it
while we were touching the Torah with our prayer books and kissing them.
I was sure I could see them sitting there at the desk at the nursing
home ringing us, wondering where in the hell we were.  (It was Shabbos;
of course they'd know.  But matters of life and death take precedence.)
So I lunged for the phone and I answered it.

Lord, lord.  It was a wrong number, and for that I'd sinned.  "Hello,
ees Jose there?" A shaggy I og story.  But later, when I was old enough
to think about it and to walk away from so much else, I made some use of
the moment, I thought: all our lives are a shaggy I og story.  All that
urgency and there's nobody at the other end; or it's somebody looking
for someone else.  I suppose my father was actually very wise, if I
choose to think of it that way: he knew he wasn't missing as much as he
was getting, going down deep inside his silence, just angling for a
little peace.  He knew he wasn't indispensable, and neither was the
world.

Now I saw myself waiting for the phone to ring, waiting for the world to
wash Jacob back to me, and all we got were pushy reporters with new
questions to ask (new only because they were too stupid for anyone to
have bothered asking sooner), anguished friends, and the peculiar
intrusions of those poor innocents who happened to call about other
things-Would you like to contribute to the college centennial fund, to
donate to your senator's campaign "to stay alive in the next election,"
and worse: Tim and Julia Novotny-he's a printmaker, she does the world's
most beautiful silver-called to say they were driving on through from
Binghamton to visit their son Scotty at Bates, where he's a freshman.
(He and Jacob used to squash frogs together, I remember that from a
summer when they were about nine or ten.  They were big and little, fair
and dark, Scotty a heavy pillowy-soft boy with invisible red-blond
eyebrows and freckles.  Together they looked like Boy Pals arranged by
Central Casting.)  "We're in Howe, half an hour maybe, sorry we didn't
give you any warning, we don't have to stay over, but it would be
lovely." And so on.  The world is always out there still, come Shabbos,
come murder, come madness.

We didn't meet them at the door with it, we sat them down, served them a
drink, talked about Scotty.  It seemed unfair, somehow, to spring it on
people who cared about us, like some gratuitous cruelty we were doing
them.  It made us stupid with apologies.  "But what can we do?" Julia
demanded of us, the worst, flat I ut and final.  "You don't know where
he is." She covered her mouth with her hand as if the very idea were
shameful, not to be uttered.

"Or if he's really-you know-if he's done anything terrible," Carolyn
said with awful aplomb.

"Why hasn't this been in the papers?" Tim wanted to know, as if he'd
been cheated of the chance to discover it himself and save us all this
embarrassment.  (Or no: that's ungenerous.  How do I know why he asked?
Maybe he thought it was a sign of media decency-unprecedented if it was
I r a barbinger of Jacob's innocence.) "It has, I think, here and
there," I assured him.  "But it's not quite sensational.  Not yet.
There's no-you know"-Carolyn and I seemed to say a lot of that, even
though nobody knew at all-"no smoking gun.

"They only suspect," Tim offered me.  When I took the offering like a
gift and nodded, my eyes filled.  There were a lot of reactions I had
given up trying to control.

Carolyn left the room at that.  We had had it out about talking too
much, about wanting to mention the bloody jack as if she owed it to
everybody who happened to be driving by to hand them our souls.

"You don't have the right to tell everybody what you know," I told her.
"You only owe it to Jacob to keep his secrets.  If that's what they are.
It might even come in handy later to have held our peace.
Just-discretion.  Reticence.  What does it hurt you?"

It hurt her in direct proportion to the value of her friendships.  "I
like to be honest if I can, Benny.  What are your friends for if you
manipulate them like that, a little truth here, a little lie there?  I
have friends so I can be myself with them; otherwise, why bother?"

I loved that in her.  She was honest the way children are honest,
without calculation, without motive.  But before Tim and Julia piled out
of their car I held my finger to my lips.  "Do Jacob a favor," I said as
gently and undemandingly as I could.  "You never know what people will
make of something innocent.  And once it's out, it's hard to call
anything back."

I asked them about Scotty, who was starring in Heartbreak House that
weekend, preparing to wear a waistcoat and muttonchops.  Julia looked
overcome.  I wanted to tell her it was nice of her, but vaguely
insulting, that she felt she couldn't say a single good thing about her
own son, as if ours were finished, done for, and the comparison would
kill us outright.  We talked a lot about the state of lithography, and
the dwindling market for good silver jewelry in a tight economy.  Of
course we'd have talked about all that anyway but the context was
strange; altered.  Every subject except Jacob felt like an evasion; the
not-knowing hung in the room like smoke and made it hard to breathe.

They didn't stay the night and we didn't insist.

I visited my workshop once every day, experimentally, but everything in
there looked stupid, useless, self-indulgent.  If this were the movies,
I thought, I'd pick up an ax and torture some wood.  Throw my favorite
piece out the window or set it afire-it's damned unphotogenic, how an
artist crashes and burns.  I couldn't build anything or draw or even
read the secondhand art books I'd been hoarding for a quiet day.  The
sketches push-pinned to the wall looked surpassingly trivial.  Who
needed all this, except for me?  What good was this roomful of junk
except on a cloudless moruing, nothing owing a single soul?

Somebody-Proust, I think-said that any artist who exchanges an hour of
work for an hour with friends and talk, social life, has given that hour
to something which is nonexistent.  Now, looking at the row of hasty
sketches, impulses waiting to catch fire, and the lists of addresses
where I could scout out my throw-away clutter-hubcaps, bobbins, kitchen
whisks!-to call the work itself nonexistent was a kindness it didn't
deserve.

I had been trying to let my work lead me, I'd begun to listen to some of
my critics when they said I manipulate my creatures too much, push them
around, graft onto them too many bright ideas.  Why must I take the
beautiful wood and fiddle with it?  Undermine it?  Somebody told me my
work was not funny, it was cynical, whereas I liked to call it
ambivalent, a love-hate relationship with everything: America, the
texture of my materials, the natural and the manufactured, all the
things of this world.  I hadn't begun to settle the question, but
whoever was right, the sketches looked incomparably stupid right now.  A
luxury, all of it.  Embarrassing that a grown man should spend his time
approximately the way he did in kindergarten, pasting purple macaroni on
a cigar box .  .

I picked up the newspaper or watched the seven o'clock news, put one
down, turned the other one off.  Armies were cutting swaths across
borders, leaders were rising, falling I utside my line of vision, all of
it.  I was beginning to get a corner, at least, of an understanding of
how people can commit suicide-not why but how: what it might feel like
approaching.  Nothing.  Everything has the taste of nothing, it holds no
attraction.  (No savor, you've heard that.  "Things lost their savor.

What a thing to fall from, the constant taste of life on the tongue and
then nothing at all.  I wasn't thinking of suicide, believe me.

I only mean it was the first time since I was a teenager, when I felt
things too much, not too little, that I could imagine it.)  The only
thing that felt good through the waiting were the walks, long walks into
the woods on snowshoes.  I didn't go up the road, I didn't want to run
into neighbors, only sloughed away onto our own trail and into the
monochrome of leafless trees and shadowy animal tracks and indentations
where ice had dripped and melted the snow in craters.  The cold air was
sharp as a paper cut-it was about all I could feel.  I welcomed it.

Carolyn came back with an armful of mail, most of it junk: ads, bills,
pleas on behalf of the rain forest, the rights of political prisoners in
Turkey and Korea, democrats right here in the U.S.  of A.  who dared to
call themselves liberal.  A sort of sympathy note, kindly and ominous,
from a psychiatrist I used to go to who had seen something about Jacob
in a Philadelphia paper: he assured me I was strong enough to handle
"whatever happens." And an ad, in Jacob's name, for MachoMail:
see-through undies-bull's-eyes, X marks the spot-Jockey shorts decorated
with photos of stupendous apparatus, aphrodisiacs, sexual aids for
swingers." (He swore he was on their mailing list courtesy of his Tape I
fthe-Month club.)  Then she handed me an envelope from the government
arts agency to whom I had applied for a grant.  For years I'd prayed for
some solace from them, for years I'd gotten the thin letter of
rejection.  This was a fat white manila envelope full of forms to be
filled out.  Twenty thousand dollars' worth-no one, I suppose, could
mind filling them out for the price.  My chest turned over; I had
drowned already and here came the life preserver.

Oh, thanks, fellas, I thought dimly.  Lawyers' fees.  I didn't even tell
Carolyn.

Stuck between an ad for the A & P and a renewal notice fur The New
Republic was the card from St.  Louis.  By now you'd think we'd have
been expecting it, we should have been guessing wbere he'd light down
next, but each one caught us like a surprise blow to the solar plexus.
We couldn't quite manage the vision of Jacob winging around the country
like a kid crossing Europe on a pass, sending frivolous messages from
airports .  .  .  Carolyn gasped when she pulled it out.

She read it, turning it over, read it again, and handed it to me with
the contorted look she had when she carried a dead pigeon off the porch,
one of Snappy's gifts.

"There's something funny about these," I said to her.  "I don't know
what."

"They don't sound like him." My God, she looked so tired, so flat.

Blondes fade like no one else.

I ran my finger along the fuzzy serrated edge of the card.  "Not that we
know what he sounds like in letters.  When has he written to Us since-I
don't know, since he was ten and went to your parents' for a couple of
weeks that summer?"

"Then what?"

I couldn't say.  These didn't sound like a kid.  There was something
weirdly-ventriloquially-adult about them.  Posturing?  Trying to sound
like an equal, like an adult among adults?  It was disquieting.

"He sounds like an impersonator.  And-I don't know, it feels like
he's"-I had to cast all around for the word-"it feels like he's playing
with us.  Toying, somehow.  Provoking.  Doesn't it?"

Carolyn was frowning.  "It's the psyche of-you're right.  He sounds like
a stranger, somehow.  I suppose nothing-what's the phrase?nothing
concentrates the mind better than-" She couldn't say it.  I was hoarding
the card so she just stood there empty-handed, her face crumpling.

It was about an hour after the message came that a woman called asking
for either of Us.  Carolyn was the one who leaped for the phone each
time, still waiting for ransom instructions.  The caller wouldn't give
her name.  She sounded older, Carolyn said.  (Older than what?) "I work
down at the post office"-said very quietly-"and I just want you to know,
if you don't already, we've got an order on to report your mail."
Carolyn choked; she said she didn't even know what to ask.  ("All the
important moments in your life keep happening for the first I think they
ought to tell you when they do that," the woman went on.  "Everything
that comes, they know it.  So I'm just letting you know." That was all.
Gently, she hung up.  That was the feeling Carolyn had-gently.
Considerately.  If it was a warning, there was nothing we could do about
it.  A point of information.  It meant they were trying to track the
cards, so we shared that point with the police in St.  Louis, in Boston,
in Albuquerque and Santa Fe.  If they were letters, sealed, would they
open them?  Was it Big Brother time when the heat was on?

I went down to the post office and looked around.  The stamp line was
stopped dead while the attendant behind the counter helped a very
white-haired lady seal and address a package that should have been done
up at home.  He was as patient as a father, bent over the box almost
reverently, half in light and half in shadow, like someone in a
Renaissance painting.  (Wouldn't he be amused, the Georges de La Tour of
Hyland, New Hampshire, or maybe the Vermeer.)  This is, I had to
concede, a hard place to hate the bureaucracy.

There were at least three women behind him sorting mail, lifting canvas
baskets, express, priority, foreign.  None of them looked "older." I
thanked them all, though I kept it to myself.  The cards would keep
coming, or stop, without their help or ours.

One night when I couldn't sleep I came downstairs for some warm milk,
and in the vague, reflected blue-white of the kitchen my shaman sat
brooding.  His round, smooth shoulders gave off sharp little stabs of
light.  "Talk to me, pal," I muttered out loud.  He sat there
impassive-no judgments, no suspicions, like the tree he'd been part of.

Then I remembered he could talk.  I leaned into the bowl of darkness
that was his belly and hit the tape recorder button: PLAY.  It clicked
at me, end of the reel.  I rewound it, standing there dumbly as if I
were watching the damn thing think.  And then, oh God, it was worse than
spooky-the Grateful Dead, and then a little boy's voice doing an
imitation of a ball-game announcer, it was Jacob doing the Sox with all
the right inflections: "A swing and a miss and Boggs goes down swinging.
That's two down in the bottom of the sixth and in the ondeck circle .  .
." The voice was his and not-his, all complicated by the ventriloquism
of the game.  (Hadn't I already thought the word ventriloquism once
today, his unearthly message from St.  Louis?) "Pitcher doesn't like the
batter's sign, shakes it off, asks for another." Eight or nine, maybe.
We went so often, splintery old Fenway that never changed, just sagged a
little more with every season, three hours driving, round trip, and then
sometimes three hours parking, just to watch the shadows come down on
the outfield and the hotdog rolls disappearing down his throat, always
eating, bird with an open mouth.  The shock of the green when you came
in, the heat of the city steaming up.  Jacob made anguished cries every
time somebody muffed the ball; with the Sox there was lots of anguish.

Sentimental Dad, All-American Dad.  I sat in a stupor of nostalgia.

Then the boy-voice disappeared and "No, peppers and mushrooms.

Right.  Not pepperoni, I said peppers.  Okay.  Likeis fifteen minutes
enough?" And then I did my wise-guy stuff: "Enough?" he echoed.

"Enough?  Enough?  Enough?  Enough?" And the Stones.  "You can't always
get what you want to." Then a mix, heady, self-indulgent, sound effects.
SpikeJones.  Judith laughing and laughing, glass breaking, the
catyeowjudith apologizing, "He knocked over some books, Daddy, it's
okay, nothing broke," and Jacob again, conspiratorial, talking softly to
someone on the phone, "No, never, I promise, listen, I really do.
N-e-v-e-r.  Believe me." Jesus, to Martha, maybe.

It was appalling.  The hairs stood up along my arms.  All of it over.  I
stole it, shouldn't have had it in the first place, but there it was.
There and gone.  Present tense is all there is, I thought.  The
here-and-now.

I sat in the dark breathing hard and then I realized there was another
sound in the room with me, the CB breathing out nothing, dead air but
that little live charge in it when someone forgets to turn it off, an
occasional hitch of random static.  Pure present tense, waiting.  A
garble of sound splattered out for a second, it sounded like "Josie,
where's the tacks?" but it probably wasn't.  He could be out there
somewhere.

I was hearing cold night air pouring in, empty.  The CB is so strange,
like a hole in the air, a rip you can put your ear to.  But there was
nothing to hear on the other side.  Then the tape in the shaman's belly
ended with a whoop of joy from both my children out of the grave of
their childhood.  Enough, enough.  A click at the tape's end, a gun
being cocked.

So I dragged up to bed and lay down to hide in sleep.

Friends came by but, try though they might to be cheerful, the visits
were like condolence calls.  We feigned interest in their lives.

Tony Berger and Celene brought news from the entire school district: he
taught band at the high school, jazz especially, swinging arrangements,
well conducted, always stiff-Tony, who left to his own devices put his
chin all the way down to the keyboard and tore out the notes, it always
seemed, with his mouth, a Thelonious Monk kind of hardslap funk, but
kept it zipped where the kids could hear him.  Celene had lady-like
curls she got at the beauty parlor, but dangerously red; she drove from
school to school to coax out little melodies from the chorus and taught
every instrument from glockenspiel to tuba.  The teachers in the
teachers' room told her what they thought of our situation-they were
never shy-and it wasn't good.  The way they talked about us you'd think
we were the Rockefellers, the Kennedys.

"They'll never find him" seemed to be the consensus.  "He's being
protected." The implication was that we could (and would) pay anything.
"God, Celene," I said, "I don't want to put you on the spot, but do you
say anything?"

She has wonderful eyes-triangular, I once decided, with the apexes at
the top, which made them large and innocent, and she used them to good
effect, especially when she wanted to look affronted.  "Of course I do.
'Don't you remember Ben when he got the middle-school kids together for
that mural, that fabulous wallful of life, how can you say that?  Rich?
All the time he put in and he got paid in postage stamps.""

"And?"

"And somehow, I hate to say it, they think that just proves you can
afford it.  'We could never work for that little money!" Such gratitude.

Oh, honey, you know how they are about artists up here.  I'm barely
tolerable, schlepping around" (she learned that from her husband)
"masquerading as a regular gal.  A parent asked me last week, 'Why do
you teach them all these funny songs?" Her kid's in the marimba quartet.
I said, 'What funny songs?" and she says, 'Those foreign ones.

Aren't there enough good American songs without'-I don't remember what
we did.  Israeli.  Japanese.  I don't know.  Hungarian." She likes to
run her fingers through her hair-she tousled it up to unlock it, I
think, from its neat school I ay compliance.

"Same for Tonyburger.  They love it when he takes the jazz band to State
and they win first for 'Tuxedo Junction' or something, but nobody really
likes to think much about where that comes from.  Not the jazz, not the
jazzman.  He wears a jacket to school, remember that.

No tie, I mean, that would be hypocrisy, but he pays-well, he pays maybe
half his dues." I enjoyed considering how Celene got the way she is-a
local girl with spirit and sophistication who met Tony in New York, in a
smoky club, just the way girls dream it when they leave the little
towns, and brought him back home to impersonate a WASP schoolteacher.

The Bergers were our best friends, all of us (except Celene) a little
marginal, forever really New Yorkers, however decent we might be.

(Nobody knew how much a sculptor earned; it was possible that I was
actually making money on the dang-fool things I did, and that probably
added to our mystery.)  As for Annie, she was over the edge because her
lovers were named Jane and Eda and, recently, Lord,
Anneliesewhocouldn'tspeakEnglishsoweknowthey'renot-talking.  It was
never quite clear whether the true Hylanders wished they'd been able to
slam the door before or after we moved in.

Wendell came, then began calling, since we had nothing to say to him.  I
needed to talk to somebody but it had better be someone with the
imagination to misbehave.  Tony sat at the table with me and I looked
hard at him and considered.  He was good with miscreants in the band
room at school (and the band room attracted them) because he had enough
of their spirit left, or remembered it fondly.  His tall wiry body, his
long, straight brown hair that fell in his eyes, were more youthful than
Wendell had been in his teens.  Hey, Tony, I wanted to say, hey, what if
it turns out Jacob's innocent-let's just say-and I'm the only damn fool
here who's guilty of anything!  We had talked, over the years, about
existential moments, choices, moral distinctions we could lay out
carefully, like surgeons' instruments.  All that had as much to do with
this, now, as-I don't know-the cheerful instructions a stewardess gives
you for exiting a burning plane.  I didn't have time to think, Tony!  I
don't know if I helped him or damned him, trashing the jack, the gloves,
the whole damn carpet from the back of the car.  Maybe I slammed the
jail-house door on him.  They don't give you time to reason it out and
choose your exit.  But I did what prudent Wendell suggested early on: I
kept my mouth shut and my options open.

My dreams were dry-that's the only word for them.  I slept a lot,
sometimes on the couch, like someone who'd been felled by illness or
early retirement, and I never dreamed about what was happening, I just
saw stretches of desert, cactus, faded blue mountains.  A trolley ran
into what I think they call a box canyon, the kind of sheer face that
rises on all sides of a trail.  I don't know who was on the trolley, it
just carried a lot of people into a cul-de-sac with beautiful pale pink
and blue striations in the rock.  I don't know why: a life bleached of
everything?  Once I woke up just as I tipped forward into a little oasis
pond in which I'd been studying my reflection.  Narcissus?  He didn't
seem exactly apropos.

Except, except-I was a kid in the dreams, whenever I was in them at all.
However you know those things, I was around Jacob's age.  I was wearing
my old black leather jacket, in which I had, once upon a time, tried to
look fierce and angry, an artist with a grievance.  One year I did
nothing but curse, nobody could talk to me, I terrified my parents and
affronted the relatives who hung out in our tiled kitchen, my pious
aunts, my hardworking cousins.  (I had an aunt who fasted once a week,
twice sometimes, to mortify her soul for God-believe me, I had a lot to
fall from.)  I think I even scared my friends.  Nothing like Jacob.  I
was so angry, had so much to break with, my father's and grandfather's
dusty old religion, the suffocation of a houseful of love with no mind,
I called it, still under the impression that mind was all that mattered,
that it was reprehensible that our little apartment held no intellect,
no art, only eating and keeping clean, eating and praying, praying and
being polite.  The ugly words that fell (or were pushed) from my mouth
were better than sex, they were the forbidden release, the dam of "Thou
shalt nots" breaking into tiny shards, and me stomping on them as
viciously as I could.

But I never hurt anybody, at least not physically.  My mother, of
course, acted as if she'd been knifed, time and again.  When I had the
Catholic girlfriend who used to call and conduct incitements to orgasm
on the phone.  When I refused to apply to college until I'd painted for
a couple of years and drove a cab to support myself.  And so on.  Epater
les parents.  I was hardly the first to discover the technique; then
again, my lack of originality wasn't much comfort to them.  I'm sure I
hurt them as badly as they thought they could be hurt.  But really they
were flesh wounds.  Little psychic nicks.  I never raised a hand.

Just come back so we can talk to you.  So we can ask you.  I woke crying
in my sleep one time, panting, huffing hard as if I was trying to
dislodge something that was choking me.  Carolyn, stretched next to me,
took my head inside her arms and held my face against her bare breasts
and patted my back the way you soothe a colicky baby.  I had been
dreaming of the Catholic Girlfriend and I was jacking up the couch on
which we were sitting.  That was all.  I pushed up and down on the jack,
faster and faster, not very mysteriously like sex, and the couch rose
and it was levitated above water finally, like something in a floating
temple garden, something Indian.  Tranced, with a little black shadow
under it that lay on the water like an ink spot.  The girl pulled up her
legs the way you would if you were taking wing on a flying carpet.

But again, leaning forward, I fell in, head first, I kept doing that.  I
was hell-bent on drowning, apparently.  "Benny, Benny," Carolyn was
nearly singing, but she couldn't say, There, there, it'll be all right,
because she'd be lying and she never lied.  I kept on crying and
finally, just at the point where you either stop, bored with your tears,
and subside into ragged breathing, or fall asleep exhausted, I heard
myself whispering, gulping, "Jacob!" Then she joined me and we cried
together.

I finally found something to do with my hands: I was making fetishes.

Praying, I suppose, as instructed.  They were small enough to hold in my
hand-clothespins with feathers.  With buttons.  Whittling a little.

One I found myself assembling had breasts and a dark Brillo triangle.

It scared hell out of me.  I opened the woodstove door and threw it into
the perfect center of the heat and watched it flare for a long second,
hissing, a wild brilliance.  I have to say that as it disappeared down
to gray ash I felt a little quiver of its power, tiny as it was, and
crude.

Maybe it was coming back to me, the feel of the image, realer than real.
I went downtown to buy thumbtacks, red, white, and blue ones, and to do
that, I had to swallow hard and walk myself into the Central, where
everybody bought their newspapers, their birthday cards, their pens.  It
was an old store, nineteenth-century, spiffed up but not past a certain
allowable point-its heavy door was ancient, slow-swinging.

Everybody hated the electronic posts we had to walk through, recently
installed, conspicuously late-twentieth I entury, that shrieked-I
suppose they shrieked, though I'd never heard them, they had their
intended chilling effect-if a thief tried to get out with a little extra
something.  They stood there like a pair of watchdogs who didn't get to
bark much.

I had my hand on the brass bar to open the door when I saw-I saw and I
swear for a second I didn't understand-a photograph of Jacob, 8'/z X 11,
grainy Xerox but clear enough, taped inside the window just where
everybody's eye must fall.  I have entered this store every day, give or
take a few, for the eleven years we've lived here, and that was why my
first reflex was surprise, it was like catching my own face in a store
window on Main Street: Wait, / know this person!

Indeed I do, and above his name, in black bold caps, they had spelled
out WANTED PERSON.

When all this finally penetrated, my knees went slack.  I put out a hand
to catch myself, my palm splayed there on the cold glass right across
his face, Jacob in a dark T-shirt squinting in the sun a little, smiling
as if he were wincing.  Wrestling practiceit was his uniform shirt.
Shadow gave him a second nose pointed off to the left, like a Picasso. A
Cubist WANTED sign.  A first.  The damn thing was in the best possible
place-I used to run a film series and that was where I t< I ped the
schedule for best effect.  By sundown everyone would have seen it, that
fine, avid, half child's face caught unawares, his father's palm print
grotesquely stamped across it like a seal.

I walked back to the car, quaking, I know, like an old man.  How do they
know?  For all I think I can guess of his guilt, how can they deal with
him like some armed robber who had his picture snapped by a bank camera?
Jacob, Jacob, wanted person, do we do our lives to ourselves or does
chance leap out at us, randomly hungry, like one of those watchdogs?

Flesh of my flesh, no fetish in the world will keep their dogs off him
now.

At about eleven the next morning Corey Weisbach called and I leaped from
my stupor on the couch to full focused attention.  His daughter had seen
Jacob in Cambridge, walking along the river.

Julie was a classmate of his, had just been in A Winter's Tale with him,
and knew him well enough not to be mistaken.  "Did she speak to him?" I
asked.  I was ready to welcome any detail; I swear if she'd said he was
chained to a tree or sleeping under a bridge I'd have been grateful.

"No," he said, sounding affronted, censorious, almost, "of course she
didn't talk to him.  She has natural presence of mind, she always has
had.  If she'd announced herself, don't you think he'd have been gone
before she closed her mouth?"

I said I supposed 50.  Santa Fe, St.  Louil flashed in my mind, those
bright scenes burned into my sight like advertising logos.  "Along the
river?" I asked stupidly.

"On the footpath, not that far from Boylston Street, if you know
Cambridge.  She was walking with her cousin, he lives in one of those
houses along there, those dormitories?  There were very few people out,
it's so cold.  She said she got a good look." Jacob in his dark wool
cap, his smooth black jacket with the hot stripes, eyes straight ahead,
puffing steam.  As if he'd read my thoughts, Corey Weisbach added, for
confirmation: "She knew his jacket.  She said she saw the jacket first
and there he was.

Corey sold cars; he was from an old car-selling family, so successful
that they stood just under the best Hyland families that didn't have to
do anything for a living.  They were the capitalist-aristocrats, with
the Ford lot here in town, another, a huge one, in Howe.  He had an
assurance about him, a public man's solidity, a good voice for accepting
awards from Kiwanis and Rotary.  Such people are rarely caught off
guard, especially by odd lots and broken sizes like me.  "Just
strolling, looking normal as apple pie," he went on in that slightly
offended tone that asked Ho'w dare he?  A knock on the head, I thought,
a hard smash by the murderer that's taken all his memory away.  Far
stranger things have happened.

I began to stammer out my gratitude, my fear that we might never have
seen him again.  I told him what a kind and sensitive thing he'd done by
tipping us off, what a humane gesture it had been.  Certainly we could
get ourselves down there-two hours, tops, by the time we organized
ourselves and pulled up on Memorial Drive.  Just knowing where he was,
more or less, though it still might not be easy .  .

"Mr.  Reiser," Corey Weisbach said-we didn't really know each other,
quite, only he was prominent enough so that he was known, a different
matter.  'You need to know we've called the authorities.  It's
altogether possible that they've picked him up already.  In fact, I
think I'd count on it."

I don't know what I said.  I must have bleated something like "Of
course, of course." I tried to cover my tracks, humiliated to be caught
thinking he'd saved us, only us; why, after all, would he have done
that?  My face was damp with every kind of emanation, sweat, tears, it
was hot in here, after my parched dreams it seemed to be raining the
moisture of relief.  "Naturally you did what you had to."

"Well," Corey Weisbach said slowly, across a huge divide that it was not
his fault lay between us.  I don't know if he bought my assurance that
I'd understood the whole time that we were not the first to learn
Jacob's whereabouts.  "You have to remember, Mr.  Reiser, that while
Julie is a classmate of your son's, she is also a classmate-or was,
should I say-of the Taverner girl.  So." To his credit, he sounded
almost apologetic.  "However." He paused rather dramatically.  "It
hasn't turned out to be so simple."

I said nothing, just waited for it to unwind however it would.

As it happened, Julie Weisbach, her famous presence of mind intact in
spite of her astonishment and fear, had gone straight to a policeman who
was standing in the brick plaza of the Kennedy School just across the
street from where Jacob was strolling.  "She assumed, as anyone would,
that he would take care of it." I winced at that: the "it" he invoked,
like an incursion of vermin or the spill of a noxious gas, was my son.
But there was nothing the policeman could do: a possible suspect from
another state-well, he was sorry to tell the girl, good intentions or
not, that it was none of his business, technically speaking.

If the kid committed a crime here, that was another thing.  Or if they
had some kind of a piece of paper from the New Hampshire police.

A warrant.  But you can't just pick somebody up because someone points a
finger at him.  He didn't phone in to check, he didn't listen when she
insisted that a murder was important enough so that there must be a
warrant somewhere.  So, her father said, she had to stand there and
watch Jacob just disappear around the bend.  When she saw him last he
was headed toward Stillman Infirmary, up near Mount Auburn, where the
trackless trolley runs.  And gone.  (Gone!  I thought.

Thank God, gone!) It was very frustrating, Corey Weisbach told me as if
he expected me to agree.  I could imagine what he might have said about
the Constitution just then; I wouldn't want to have heard It.

"So we've alerted the authorities here, since that seems to be the thing
to do"-authorities, that ridiculous word, its all-purpose assertion of
power and control-"and I assume they'll figure out how to proceed." I
expected him to add the inevitable "After all, isn't that what we pay
them for?" But instead he stopped for a minute and then he began again.
He cleared his throat, almost decorously.  "I'm very sorry.

I went to tell Carolyn, who was sitting placidly, infuriatingly, in an
armchair in the living room, reading in golden light.  She listened
without saying anything, but her face lost ten years as I spoke.  "So,"
she said quietly, as if that was that.

She came into my arms and we held between us, tightly, the possibility
that we might see him soon.  "How could we possibly find him?" I asked;
I wanted to be reassured.  "That is one big goddamn city."

"But you know the way you run into people, Ben-we can't go down there
without seeing somebody from another life." It was true; the
concentration of certain kinds of people around the Square was sometimes
astonishing.  It usually left you convinced there were only fifteen
people in the world and you knew twelve of them.  Then again, it was not
outdoors weather; in January they put their heads down and walked to
their destinations in a straight line, without loitering.

The silver-jewelry salesmen and Ecuadorian-sweater peddlers weren't out,
the musicians were blowing their horns, tuning their guitars, in warm
living rooms.

"We're going," I said, nonetheless.  "There is no way he's in Cambridge
and we're not out trying to find him."

What a look she had on her face just then-not for me, mind you.

It sailed right past me, winged past my ear and out the window: distant,
almost-ironic, I guess.  As if she had stepped back from all of it,
stubbornly alone on her own side of the room.  I think she was picturing
us walking around Cambridge, peeking down alleys, knocking on strangers'
doors, skulking around theater lobbies like obsessed lovers waiting for
a glimpse of our beloved.  She looked as if she was going to be
embarrassed by such a search.  "Carolyn, how can we not do this, even if
it's impossible."

"How will I be able to live with myself," she answered in a flat voice.
"Right?  Isn't that the sentence that comes next?"

Where in the hell was she going?  Had she gone, I mean-clearly the
damage was already done.

"Correct," I said with not one ounce of reserve or that goddamn irony
that put everything at a far remove.  "Correct.  How could you live with
yourself?"

She sighed, long and hard.  "And if we find him-?"

"Yes?  If we find him?  What's the question?"

"Don't be dense, Ben.  What do you do with him?  Bring him back?

Give him your credit card and drive him to the airport and say, Beat it?
Go lose yourself?"

I didn't know.  I probably would.  Santa Fe.  St.  Louis.  A dozen other
airports, Portland, Chicago, Los Angeles.  I suspected I would.  But I
didn't know.  "You'd put him in leg chains and bring him home?"

She only looked at me.  Her eyes darkened as she did; tears, I suppose.
I wanted to shake her dry.  "This is your son we're talking about."

I said it as nastily as I could; being nice to her wasn't the point.
"If you've forgotten.  This is Jacob."

"If I've forgotten." She kept on staring, dumbly, and his name hung in
the air like something that had been struck with a mallet, the way it
did the very first time we said it to his small dark head, still wet
from its birth.  It echoed.  Finally she shook her head and the tears
brimmed over and down.  "I don't know either.  That's why I don't want
to be the one to find him." She tried to draw the tears back with a
ragged breath.  "Just-let whatever has to happen happen."

That was enough for me.  "I didn't know you were so goddamn passive," I
said, thinking of the way she fought for her patients, how she insisted
that too many things were allowed to run their course when intervention
might have changed the balance.  "Passive," I think, was her least
favorite word.

I went into the kitchen, moving ungently to get my coat and gloves.

My sneakers would do; there wouldn't be enough snow in Boston for boots.
Crust, maybe, slush, archipelagoes of ice on the sidewalks, gray stony
mountains at the curb.  Now that Corey Weisbach had alerted the
authorities, everyone in Cambridge would be studying his face; they
weren't going to let him slip through again.  I picked up my coffee mug,
which had been sitting cooling on the counter.  It was a National Public
Radio mug, heavy and dark, signed in white by a dozen com posers.  Chic.
All I could think to do (though think is hardly the word) was to throw
it against a surface that would stop it dead .  I flung it at the
farthest cupboard door like a pitch to the plate, and it disintegrated.

Coffee ran like shitty water down the pale wood, and pieces of those
signatures, Bach to Philip Glass, flew around the room as if I had
detonated something with wires in it, and powder.

This, she thought, watching Ben fishtail down the road toward Boston, is
where judgment either kicks in or it doesn't.  He truly believed-he had
the ego to believe-he would show up, walk around town a little, and run
smack into Jacob.  He said he believed it based on the clear fact that
when there's someone you unequivocally don't want to meet you will
surely pass him, shoulder to shoulder, on the same side of the street. A
good joke.

She had gone upstairs to Judith last night, to tuck her in, and had
remembered a dropped stitch.  "You started saying something that first
night about how mad Jacob was the morning hedisappeared.  But the phone
rang.

Judith shrugged.  "I don't know if it has to do with anything.  I mean,
you get in bad moods all the time and you don't go out and-" She sighed
deeply and went around it.  "He was just mad because Daddy told him he
had to pay for the whole senior prom himself, whatever it cost.  Jacob
wants to-wanted, I mean-to rent a stretch limo, you know the way they
do, he and his friends and their girls and all, and, like, ride around
in it all night?  And Daddy just said, So where are you going to get the
money for that?" She looked abashed, somehow, embarrassed, probably for
her father; surely not for Jacob.

Carolyn steadied herself.  "Were they yelling at each other?"

"Oh-" Judith looked trapped where she didn't want to be.  "You know how
they yell and then it just sort of passes.  Jacob thinks Dad dy's, like,
secretly, you know, like, really conservative?  Only he hides it, and
that's worse.  That's a hypocrite.  Jacob says."

But Judith was right: could it matter that he'd started the day piqued
at his father?  Martha was the one he'd have sat with in the back of the
limo, drinking who-knows-what, watching TV, feeling rich.  If anything,
Martha, you'd think, would have comforted him, ballasted him-whatever it
took-against his ball-breaker dad.

She didn't worry about his hypocrisy.  But for all his earnestness about
his art, she sometimes wondered, very far down where she didn't like to
go, if Ben was a sufficiently serious person.  She wasn't quite sure
what she meant by that, she only knew she had a hunch that in the really
tight spots like the one they were in, he would carry on, perform, make
people laugh; be strong, even, the way he'd hidden the bloody evidence
without shame or even hesitation.  With Ben, things-what he called
principles, anyway-were open and shut.

Something-humility?  indecision?  openness to grief, to ambiguity?in
spite of his artist's claim to complexity, like the claim he made to
Jacob that money didn't matter when in fact it did-something was
missing.  He was so resolved.  Was it something male that demanded
assertiveness?  Was it a habit born of presenting a solid front to his
skeptical parents, who had wanted him to be an engineer, an accountant?
He had fought so hard for his independence; it was a tic now.

One of the intriguing things about Ben, when they'd met, was the
fierceness of his commitment to things she, with all her valedictorian's
confidence, couldn't see.  She had come to a gallery with some friends
not for the art, really, but for the wine and cheese, and the unfamiliar
feeling in the air, the colorfully dressed women, the men with their
unruly beards and their capacious clothes, the army jackets, the
weathered leather vests and Moroccan bags, the paint-stained affectation
of their jeans, stereotypes all and she knew it.  She needed a change of
scenery, though: in medical school, deep in the hard part, she'd needed
a good place to waste time before she forgot how.  Or at least a place
to spend unregimented hours looking at something besides anatomy splayed
out on a table.  And there was Ben, who believed so forcefully in the
necessity of his art.  ("Mine.  Not this stuff here tonight.  I came for
the wine and cheese.") He really believed it saved you, redeemed mere
life from its "everydayness." You'll save lives, he said, but what for?
What's a life?  Any animal can have health, it's a minimal expectation.
But then?

So he'd take her by the hand and lead her to the side of some mysterious
canvas, some taut banner of color hanging suspended, hinting at a glory
without a name.  He made her stare at a Rothko, pink and orange, yellow
shimmering like a sunset in a dream, even a medical student was entitled
to a dream like that, until it became liquid, till it poured all around
like blissful breaking light in the room.  Yes, she said, yes, he was
right, it was an experience as real as waking.  She would leave the
lists she was learning, parts of the shin and ankle, galaxies of ribs,
alternative functions of organs, and go with him to see Michelangelo
drypoints, or the stunning elegance of a Papuan mahogany paddle standing
upright against a pure white wall, more sophisticated than anything a
Dansk designer could imagine.  She watched him work and wondered what he
saw; he covered half the canvas with his hand so that he could judge it,
turned it on its side and upside down, and he said, Look, Doctor, what
do you see?  (A canvas standing on its head?) Then he'd attack a corner
that was clearlyhe said clearly-deficient.  If she could see bacteria in
a lens, he could see empty corners of canvas that shouted for attention.
He would disappear inside a Bonnard and come out beaming.

And he was loving, so loving, in the details, and better than she was,
in the whole.  Not abstracted like so many men whose lives at work are
the sole point of it all, with a little border of family for decoration.
He was not hidden, he was not emotionally constipated.

He honored all things that deserved honor: his children at play, in
pain, in sleep.  Her thoroughly equal need to do her work, even when the
children were home sick.  He was more vigorous than she was, and far
more daring.  They weren't talking enough right now, but he could talk,
usually he could talk without this new defensiveness, and he'd never let
her go to bed angry.  He hugged too hard, but she'd always thought, So
what, so what?  It was the cost of his vitality.

She couldn't name the missing part.  Since she subscribed to the
ambiguity of just about everything, she didn't really want to.  But the
suspicion fell like a stone in her gut.  Fell with the kind of deadly
certainty she imagined overtaking people when they found the first
symptom of their undoing: felt the lump, saw the blood, discovered that
the little mole was expanding, its ragged edges reaching out.  She loved
Ben and respected him, but his enthusiasms and his panics sometimes had
their way with him.  In a pinch-in a vise like this one-she was plenty
sure of his passion but not the least sure of his judgment.

For once the phone wasn't ringing-the helpful weren't clamoring to help
nor the threateners threatening.  She and Judith had a quick cold meal
and sat down to watch the kind of junk the kids couldn't get enough of,
beginning with the exception-that-proves-the-rule perfection of Bill
Cosby's pretend house, kids, marriage: He's in the kitchen making a mess
but trying; his beautiful lawyer-wife is laughing indulgently, ready to
come to the rescue without the slightest trace of rancor, only a
patronizing embrace when the chocolate pudding emerges looking like a
cowflop.  Given the relaxed state of her household, this woman must have
made partner a long time ago.

Judith knew her mother never watched this sort of thing with her, she
was a Public Television Mom who called the rest of this stuff
"peanuts"-fattening but not filling.  And once you start you can't stop.
But she was happy to have her there, the two of them slender enough to
fit into the same fat-lapped chair.  And Carolyn needed her warmth:
mothers, she had been known to say with the kind of authority only
parents can have, and only when their young children are still
pre-critical, have as many needs as children, but they've tucked most of
them out of sight.

When they got up between shows to make cocoa, Judith began telling her
mother about a girl in school who was a liar.  She called her
"pathological" so often Carolyn saw that she liked the professional
sound of the word.  "She said she was born in Borneo.  Hey, born in
Borneo!-maybe that's where she got that-and she lived on every continent
and swam in every ocean.  But then one time we were having geography and
Mrs.  Berney asked her to name the continents and she only got three. So
then everybody could tell she was a pathological liar." Judith swept the
hair behind her ears triumphantly and asked Carolyn why somebody would
do that.

The answer, it seemed, always turned out to be the same, no matter what
the infraction, Carolyn realized it even as she said it: "Insecurity.

She must not think she's interesting enough, somehow, on her own.

So she just improves on herself."

"I daydream like that," Judith said matter-of-factly.  "I think of
myself as, you know, like, a prima ballerina, or for a while I was the
one who got picked to play Annie, I thought that would be the best
thing.

With a voice you could hear across the street, and I wouldn't have to go
to school, I'd have tutors." But, she meant, I'm not crazy.  I'm not
pathological.

"Mom."

"What, hon?" Carolyn got down two mugs and two marshmallows.

What an all-American scene, she thought, the women at home being chummy
in a pretty kitchen, talking daydreams.  The father absent and the son
not mentioned.  The pathological son.

Judith was just where she was.  "Do you think Jacob-"Carolyn waited.
Nothing.  "What?  Do I think Jacob what?"

"Was 'secure' or 'insecure'?  Is, I mean.  Sometimes I get very mixed up
about people who are pushy or nasty actually being scared, and all.  I
mean, aren't there people who are just plain not nice?  Not the opposite
but, like-the way they act is the way they really are?

Couldn't that be?"

Judith was tired of, she resisted, the relativity of judgment, the
blight of knowing too much, or thinking you do.  Dr.  Freud's gift to
the world: absolution by weakness, by prior pain.  Carolyn couldn't
blame her.  She would try to answer but she had some questions to ask
first.  "Well, Jude, you know your brother.  What do you think?"

"No, I don't.  I don't think I know him.  He does-funny things
sometimes."

Carolyn let her go on.  She stirred the pinkish cocoa carefully,
scraping the grit from the bottom of the pan with the edge of her spoon.

"One time he was stoning a dog."Judith wasn't looking at her, she was
tracing her finger on the table in a vortex as if she were stirring,
too.  "I didn't want to tell you.  I mean-he made me promise." She stole
a quick look at Carolyn.  "Up in the meadow, he had this little yellow
dog, I never saw it before, and he had it, like, on a rope attached to a
tree?  And one day-it was a Saturday, Celeste and I were going up in the
woods, we had a picnic?" Her tentative eighties-speak monitored her
listener endlessly: Get it?  Understand?  You following?  She was not
getting it.  "He was throwing rocks at it, and it was howling, it was,
like, hurling itself around the trunk of the tree and it kept getting
stuck, like, in the rope, and dirtying itself and then stepping in It.
Its fur was all-yuck, it was torn up, it was bleeding in these little
patches, you know, like it looked like mange, sort of, but it wasn't a
mangy dog, I don't think, it looked like a nice plain cute dog that
probably belonged to somebody." She paused for a minute.  "He wasn't
trying to kill it or anything," she said as if to exonerate him a degree
or two.  "I don't know what he was trying to do.  And then he got so mad
at us for seeing him he threw a couple of rocks at us, and we ran away.
It wasn't our fault we saw him, I told him that, we just came along, we
were going out to the big rock.  But, like-" Carolyn was too stunned to
pursue the details.  Did he have another life?  This couldn't be Jacob.
He was never cruel!  He was acerbic, ungrateful, sometimes devious
perhaps, but she had never seen him cruel.

"Then he's so nice.  Like that same night he offered to fix my bike?

So I said, 'Oh, Jake, you're just being nice so I won't tell." And he
really got his feelings hurt, he said, 'They don't have anything to do
with each other.  You're my sister and your brakes are loose and this
isn't, like, blackmail or anything." Carolyn reached behind her like a
blind woman to find a chair.  How did she know him?  How do you think
you know your son?  Up to a certain age, everything he does is visible
to you.  And gradually he walks away.  She cried, she remembered, when
she put his first tiny shoes on his feet, shoes no bigger than
leaves-partly because they trammeled him so' they cropped his toes and
held them caught.  That was the end of the Garden of Eden for him, when
she laced on that white scuffy leather with its million folds where his
foot would scratch its lines of movement.  And then because she could
see already, at two months or whatever it was, three because she put it
off so long and it was summer, that he would walk away someday. Everyone
thought her tears were ridiculous, an overreaction, but she had been
right, no one else cared enough to follow it through logically: those
shoes were patterned to take him away from her.  When she gave him over
to others, to his sitters and the day-care center and then to school,
the shadow began to fall across her gaze-of course she gave him over, of
course she yielded him up, and gladly, naturally.  She wasn't
pathological.

Then she knew him by the spoor his actions left-those bike brakes he
fixed for his sister, the way he answered the phone, the games they
played in the backseat of the car, how he spoke to strangers, the way he
wore his heels down on one side so badly that the shoemaker shook his
head in despair, the way he toed in slightly, not enough to have to
undergo that bar they gave severely pigeon-toed infants, but just enough
to pull his shoes into an unmistakable curve.  His soiled gym clothes,
his sheets stiff with the evidence of his coming-of-age, the letters he
wrote his grandparents, his love of math, the way he liked to buy gifts
for people, his fear of airplanes overcome by the pilot's friendliness
that time, his trip to the cockpit.  His passion for raspberries, which
he went to pick in season, even if it meant turning out of bed at dawn.
What did she know, what did she not know?  Stoning a dog up in the
meadow?  She had no breath for it.  Judith circled her, saying, "Mom,
are you all right?  I shouldn't have told you." She had the stricken
eyes of someone in trouble.

"No, I'm not all right, Jude." She closed her eyes.  "It's good that you
told me.  It isn't your fault, love.  But how can I be all right?"

Seventeen years of infinite painstaking attention, intimate, consuming,
slacking off as it had to around when?  Eighth grade or so-a spotty
dedication to the details after that.  Not wanting to crowd him.  Not
asking more questions than she had to.  Not saying "Don't do this or
that" with girls, only saying "Don't come home too late.  Call us if
you're going to be very delayed.  Drive carefully." Stoning a dog.
Watching its fur bead up with blood.  Hearint' it howl for release.

What is impossible in this world?

Is there anything that cannot happen?

I was relieved to be out of the numbing grip of the house.  The narrow
road to Cambridge ran between high banks of plowed snow pocked black
with automobile scum like stubble.  It had gotten warm; there was fog. I
drove carefully, twenty in school zones though the kids were safe
inside, braking in the little towns that straddle the New
Hampshire-Massachusetts border.  Even at this speed, meant to incite no
officers of the law, as if I could heal things by my care, I felt a
little out-of-control-not quite, but nearly.  I realized suddenly, if
anything happened to one of my tires I'd have no jack.  That made me
laugh again, the laugh bubbling up like vomit.  "Officer, what can I
tell you, I have a thing about jacks.  I even have one hidden in a pile
of junk in my workshop.  Confiscated, for the safety of the
neighborhood." I was getting giddy, too alone with it, I wished Carolyn,
at least, were with me, going where I was going.  I kept forgetting what
this was about.  I, I, I.

The idea of murder, too, had become like a word you say too many times,
didn't you do this when you were a kid, till it had no shape, no start
or finish, had dumped its contents on the cold hard ground: Murder.  An
amusing-sounding word.  Murdermurdermurdermur.  The fog took me in as if
I were heading into smoke, into a burning house, bent on rescue.  I
turned on the radio and shouted while the angriest heavy metal banged
behind me, drums like something falling down the stairs, and shrieking
guitars and words not meant to be understood.

It was the kind of music you loved if you were sixteen, seventeen-murder
music, make no mistake.

And I walked as if I were the one who was hunted.  Across the Yard,
mostly deserted in late afternoon, its bare little trees brittle, the
crisscrossing cement paths that are so idyllic in spring nothing but
brown-gray now, snow melting around them, wetting them down.  Purposeful
students passed me on their way to the silence of the library.  The
lights were on inside; they'd have to be, it was that kind of scene, me
out here, all joy sealed up in there, deliciously warm.  Of course, of
course, like a scene in a fucking movie.  It was extremely quiet, though
if I listened hard the traffic gritted behind me on Mass.  Avenue.
Mostly it was boots squishing by, a squirrel clicking across the path
and onto crusted snow.  Melancholy is too literary a word.  Sorrowful is
too final.

All I did was itch-I burned with impatience and exhaustion and
bewilderment, and I couldn't scratch it.  It made me drunk, so that I
had the impulse to do insane things that might feel good, piss behind a
tree, roll down the steps of Widener Library, assault the most innocent
face I could see.  And I saw plenty, these safe, unracked, unsuspect
children with their green book bags, their long, bright scarves.

What were their worst crimes, these comfortable, half-arrived Harvard
kids?  Cheating on tests?  Disloyalty to their roommates, the stealing
of girlfriends, boyfriends?  Vomiting up their ice<ream sundaes to stay
thin?  Unbridled masturbation?  When I was that age-I think the first
sculptures I made were actually all sublimated versions of fuckable
women.  It wasn't Rodin I was copying, they were all Henry Moores, those
zaftig women with monstrous thighs and huge holes in the middle.  Who'd
have guessed you could get it off, metaphorically speaking, in the
Sculpture Garden at the Museum of Modern Art?  Well, that was probably
what Moore intended.  Dermurdermur.  I saw a boy Jacob's exact height
and build, but his jacket was wrong, it was navy, hooded, plain, and I
was looking for sinister black, a little vain, with stripes.

Maybe he ditched it, he's hiding in lamb's clothing-but Julie Weisbach
had known him by his colors, and that was only a few hours ago.  The boy
in navy disappeared around a corner.

I walked until my feet were so cold I could hardly stand.  It had been
warm earlier but dark was seeping down and the air was thick with
dampness, and icy, the sky pink with snow that was going to fall before
morning.  In front of the Coop the inevitable fliers were being pressed
into passing hands.  They aren't political anymore-I took a discount
coupon for a new Indian vegetarian restaurant called Baba's, and a
salmon-colored ad for a channeler who was coming to town to reunite us
with our old selves; better ones, I hoped.  Tickets were twelve
bucks-would it be worth that to discover I was really Attila the Hun or
a Carmelite nun?  I stuffed them in a garbage can and thought, Maybe I
need to print up a thousand likenesses of his face before the police do
it, and put out a plea: HAVE Y0U SEEN THIS PERSON?

I wouldn't have to say why-just another missing kid, a runaway.  I could
staple them to lampposts, the way people did for strayed animals.

Answers to Jacob.  If seen, call collect.

I was standing at the corner, ready to cross the street, when I heard a
cheerful voice shout "Benjamin!" There was only one person who loved to
call me that and I was right: it was Pearl Hedrick, who ran the gallery
on Newbury Street where I showed a couple of years ago.

She gave me the necessary hug, the cheek-to-cheek air kiss.  She was
svelte as a model, her mouth red as a joke, her short dark hair slicked
back like a World War I German officer's.  It always amazed me that she
could be as serious about art as she was, looking like that-my
prejudice, I guess.  In fact, she simply treated herself like another
work, shaped and painted with great precision.

"It's been so long, Ben, don't you get down here from your Fden
anymore?" She pretended personal hurt.  Beside her stood a young man,
younger than she, who must have been her catch I fthe-day.  He could
only have taught at Harvard, or maybe even studied there, given the
sweater and wool jacket (open to the freezing afternoon-who says
intellectuals aren't macho?) and the untrammeled tufts of hair over his
ears.  "Ben Reiser, Marshall Biedenstein.  Marshall"-she beamed at me,
with a funny screwing-up of her face that came as close to a wink as
someone like Pearl would allow herself-"has just learned that he's this
year's Yale Younger Poet."

He didn't study his feet or shuffle uncomfortably.  He looked straight
at me, unsmiling, not at her, and amended her PR.  "Next year's,
technically."

I congratulated him as heartily as I could.  I knew a poet pretty well
once who threshed every ounce of his experience into careful lines; once
he was thrown off a subway platform by a drunk and I remember thinking,
after my gratitude that he hadn't hit the third rail or been mowed down
by a D train, Oh my God, we'll never hear the end Of this.  And we
didn't; he did a whole series, in a dozen voices.  Now, looking at the
swarthy-faced young poet, whose eyes were critical and a little too
weary for his years unless he'd had one hell of a life, I wondered,
Lord, what would he make of us?  What effusion about the impossibility
of knowing an Other, or about the unpredictability of the fates.  How
many types of ambiguity could he summon in Jacob's name and mine?  All
of them deserved, mind you, but off to the side just now, slightly
ridiculous.  No wonder Carolyn despises what I do with my life-the
thought flashed up like a nasty fin out of the water.

Which matters most, Benny, a temperature of 104 or a lovely pegged seam
(Look, Ma, no nails!).  Or the discoveries Pearl was always making with
breathy enthusiasm, the Lithuanians and Inuits who made paintings on
broken glass or sculptures out of human bone.  Once she gave over her
whole gallery to a mock-up of a dentist's office, in painted plaster.
Well, I should talk-I was her flavor I fthe-month once, me and my bonded
junk, and grateful for it.  You couldn't compare a Michelangelo to a I
04 fever either .  .  .  Marshall Biedenstein would have been amused to
know what invisible armies swarmed, snarling, across his face and
sweatered chest.

I stared at them both out of my haze, amazed, simply, that we spoke a
shared language.  I suppose I'd really drifted, as if I were not the
hunter but the quarry.  But I must have been coherent, insofar as I
spoke (I remember asking her nothing), because she didn't pass her hand
before my eyes to check my state of mind, nor did she even seem to
regard me oddly.  She asked many eager ordinary questions about the
family, one by one.  When she got to Jacob I said, "Fine, fine," and
then madly, just on a hunch, "You haven't seen him, by any chance?  Out
here today?" As if she wouldn't have mentioned it if she had.  (Someone
had told me his picture'd been in the Globe: on the lam.

Apparently she didn't read those pages.) "Lost him?" She shook her head
sympathetically.  "Try the record store, I think that's where they
congregate at his age."

"Well, if you see him-" But I trailed off.  If, then?  as Carolyn might
Put it.  If Pearl told him, Hey, Jacob, I just ran into your father on
that corner, what would he do?  We weren't the only ones, Carolyn and I,
who were staggered by unanswerables.

I turned down her invitatiOn to go in someplace to warm up over a drink
and celebrate Marshall's good luck.  "I really need to find him and get
home before it snows," I said, and clapped her too hard on the arm, the
way I might have slammed a racquetball opponent a shade too heartily for
his victory.  "Marshall," I said firmly, as if I were his uncle or one
of those friends of the Graduate's family who suggested that his future
lay in plastics.  "Good luck with it.  I hope they make a movie of your
book." He didn't smile.  I found a shred of polite curiosity and asked
what it was called.

"The Delights of Death," he told me, smiling finally, beginning to turn
away.

The delights of death.  Well, it was his baby.  I guess it sounded good
to him.  I wanted to say, "Hey, watch that, mister, you've got power
under your hands with a title like that." My grandmother would have
said, more simply, "Darling, you shouldn't know from it."

"Give my best to the crew!" Pearl shouted and, turning her boyish head,
crossed the street with her arm firmly tucked into her lover's, a
solidarity that looked nearly spiteful.  I stood where I was, across a
swollen river of traffic.  My fingers were so sweaty inside my gloves
that I pulled them out into the knifing cold and discovered they were
shaking.  Oh, the delights of death!  We were all like little children
reaching after experience we couldn't-shouldn't-have.  Wasn't reality
terrible enough without our carefully consided reputations with their
perfectly mitered corners, their clever line breaks?  Yes, my love, I
thought, a 104 fever-and-rising is worse, counts for more, kicks the
globe out of alignment on its axis.  And death is no delight: not a
fruit, not a flower, not a metaphor for anything else on earth.

I called someone I thought I remembered he knew, one of the few Hyland
High graduates who'd made it to Harvard.  He'd been a Westinghouse
Science Search finalist with a good experiment on nutrition
in-something.  Not mice.  Well, close enough.  His roommate answered.
No, Larry Tournier wasn't there; neither was anyone else.

Ridiculous to think he might be there.  I didn't know another soul he
knew.  I went into a coffee shop, drank from a cup so hot it made my
eyes tear when I bent my head over it.  I picked a fight with the
waitress because they charged for a second cup; after that, she made a
wide berth around me.  I put my head down on the Formica table and tried
to sleep, looking, I'm sure, like a drunk who'd happened to get his
hands on fifty cents for coffee and not a penny more, and even though I
was too exhausted for honorable wakefulness I couldn't even drift away.
I heard the buzz and shamble of the despised beautiful children arguing,
flirting, discussing Kierkegaard or the Celtics or whatever the hell
they do when they sit around at dinner.  If the waitress only knew, I
thought melodramatically, why I'm so tired, who I've been looking for
and why-Martha Taverner packing cones at Jacey's looked a little like
this girl, healthy and blond and a blend of slyness and innocence
appropriate to her age-she'd be out the door with two more hours still
left on her shift.  All the dangers were past for me, I thought, give or
take a couple of forms of annihilation (I was sure that if I went
outside I'd fall into the path of a car or crack my spine slipping on an
icy patch).  Hey, kid, I told myself, my cheek sticky against the
tabletop, now you can go be an existentialist hero.  Enlist in
Nicaragua, in El Salvador, what do you have to lose?  I felt a peculiar
light-headed exultation.  Jacob, no question, would be feeling the same
thing, whatever else it might bring with it-ties cut, obligations
canceled, the criminal is free, the free man is a criminal, when you
have no place to lay your head it all comes to the same thing in the
end.

I had a place to lay my head, of course, only it was an hour and a half
away.  I spent the night in the parking lot ofa mini-mall in Concord.

Just as I headed north out of Cambridge it had started to snow, and
between the scrim of flakes that was coming down like heavy fog and the
bleariness of my own exhaustion once I'd passed that moment of
selfdramatization-the free man is a criminal!-I knew I couldn't hold on
to the car, it was going to spin out on me.  I only hoped the police
wouldn't come shining their lights in the window.  I curled up on the
backseat and prayed not to dream.  When the light came in to me in the
morning, the sky and the ground were exactly the same glowing white-I
felt as if I was trapped inside a pearl.

When I got home Carolyn was on the phone giving a consultation ahout the
dosage of a baby's medication.  All I heard was "Not before three
months.  No, never.  Please, when I say never I mean absolutely never."
But she was gesturing wildly.  I didn't understand.

Finally she took the pad and wrote in big letters: THEY F0UND HIM!

Judith came running in while I was washing the night off my face at the
kitchen sink.  "Daddy!  You didn't see him?  He's in Cambridge right
where you were!  But I don't understand about all the postcards."

I hugged her hard.  "You can ask him yourself, sweetface.  Do you know
anything else?  He's okay?"

She kept on holding my hand, gleeful, as if this was the end of it and
everything was going to be all right.  "Oh, it's so complicated.  He was
staying with somebody, we don't know him.  Someone he met, I guess.  And
he was, like, in some kind of trouble, they were arresting him, I think
he was mad at somebody and he stole all his stuff, his stereo and his
clothes and all, it was about drugs-"

"Wait, wait.  Jacob did?"

"No, this other guy-" She gave me a look that said this should all be
self-evident.  "So, they just found him there.  Jacob.  Like-I think it
was, like, a complete coincidence." She hugged me again.  "I don't
exactly understand.  But Mommy says we have to go down there, so you
have to get right back in the car.  My poor daddy!" She hopped around,
the way I remembered the two of them, very little, when we suggested a
movie, a day at the amusement park.  "Daddy, aren't you glad?"

I didn't know.  I thought he might have been safer on the run.  But
maybe not.  Hiding out with a druggie, a stranger with a temper, a taste
for vengeance-I don't suppose that's what a sane man would call freedom.

"It's snowing real bad, Judith."

"But we've got to go!  How can we not go?  He's in jail, but Wendell
said we can see him if we go right now."

I was afraid, and not of the drive.  I didn't want her to see me
terrified, so I only repeated it.  "Coming home I slid around a lot, and
it's getting worse fast."

She said "Daddy!" with the exasperated superior look she's learned from
Carolyn: "When I say never He's in jail and he needs us.

I'm going to go if I have to walk!" Judith knew that people used to do
that.  I read it in the town history: nineteenth-century students who
went to school near Boston routinely walked eighty miles home, eighty
miles back, up mountains, across valleys, for their holidays.  They
seemed to make nothing of it.  I wondered what their soles were made of.
Superior soles, superior souls.  They hadJacob: I kept Seeing the
bluewhite glare of a cop car's lights flashing on, flashing off,
sweeping across his face, his body, all the way to his toes where his
feet turn in a little.  On for danger, off for safety, exposed, hidden,
exposed, hidden, urgently blinking, showing him to us for an instant,
then taking him away.  I stood at the window and watched the world being
Obliterated, minute by minute losing ground to the color of nothing.

They were going to leave Judith at home; she swore she would never
forgive then,.  It had suddenly occurred to Carolyn that they couldn't
bring a child, however loving and concerned, to a jail-house
confrontation-it was worse than a visit to the 1CU, not only
inappropriate but probably illegal.

"We'll take you to the Rapaports'," she said, forming the idea even as
she spoke.  They had a good number of friends in and around Boston, but
the Rapaports' daughter was Judith's age.  "We're going to stay over, so
you can come with us and just-play with Clarissa when we go to see him."

"Thanks," Judith answered frigidly.  "I don't 'play with' anyone
anymore, in case you haven't noticed." She was pale with anger.  "And
normal people are in school, anyway."

She didn't like the sound of that "normal."

"Well, maybe you can go along with her, wouldn't that be interesting, to
see another school?"

Judith answered, but Carolyn wasn't listening.  She had realized that
there were a lot of things she needed to say to Ben about Jacob that she
somehow didn't want her daughter to hear.  It was odd-this was the same
reluctance that had kept her from ever acknowledging within Judith's
hearing that she had had an abortion once, very soon, too soon, after
Judith's birth; some delicacy made her hesitate for fear Judith would
generalize to herself: If you could so easily cast off a child, why
then, it could as easily have been me!  She thought this a ridiculous
qualm, especially since she had had no second thoughts about the
abortion beyond regret, the necessary sadness.  She herself had
generalized, actually: had stood over Judith's crib the evening after
the "procedure" and mourned for the lirtle clump of cells never to
become a soul in exact proportion to how much she loved this whole and
complex and achieved little person sleeping in the shadows of the
night-light.

But she worried a lot about the distortions in children's minds, the
connections between events that load them with mistaken responsibility
or make them accidental, unintended victims-she saw it among her
patients, the children traumatized by rotten luck from which they can
never untangle their own character; the children with tics and twitches,
the ones who bump into sharp objects and fall too often, who think
themselves wicked.

She stopped herself then.  A lot of good it's done, that protectiveness,
she thought bitterly.  Given the outcome, probably everything they'd
done ought to be stood on its head.  But that was futile and extreme,
and far too self-pitying.  She went to pack some clothes.  "Put out some
food for Snap," she called over ller shoulder to Judith.  "Enough dry
food for a couple of days."

"Are we leaving the heat on, so she won't freeze?" Judith was still
speaking stiffly, to punish her.  "Last time her water bowl froze over."

"The heat?  Oh, Jude, really.  Cats don't freeze indoors, whatever the
temperature." Even if they did, she was thinking, enough protectiveness.
Enough trying to guess exactly what everybody needs.  What is given
doesn't correlate with what's received.  If she can't figure out how to
keep herself warm, then let her freeze.

It didn't quite feel like a jail.  She wasn't sure what she'd been
expectingthat somehow, because she didn't like to watch cop movies on
television, and read mystery stories only because they were like chess
games, regretting the gratuitousness of the bloodshed it took to get
them started, reality should have rearranged itselfgentled itself -into
something less raw.  She had never understood why people needed guns and
chases and fists splintering jaws to feel stimulated.

If it was some primal fantasy wish-fulfillment, then there was more
anger out there than she'd like to acknowledge, held under by main
force.  Or else most lives were simply too boring-that was plausible.

She had daily mysteries, life-and-death choices (though not as many as
people might think); maybe she couldn't imagine how dull the average
routine could be.

The Cambridge jail was up high, like a penthouse, at the top of the
court building.  Except for the man who searched your bag and the
electrical apparatus hulked at the entrance as if you were about to
board a plane, it was distinctly unlurid; it could have been any kind of
office building-Universal Bathroom Tiles on 3, Pharmaceuticals Inc.  on
lfl.  There was a lively foot traffic (lawyers?  clerks?) and the
cheerful back-and-forth of hallway acquaintanceship conducted in
flatvoweled Bostonian.  When you pushed the seventeenth-floor button, of
course, you gave yourself away as something other than a courthouse
functionary.  But even then, Carolyn thought, I must look like a lawyer,
not a mother.  Except for the set of her face, her mouth rigid almost to
the point of distortion, she did look like some assistant D.A.  with a
mission.

But Ben did the talking.  He looked grim and a little angry, as if,
provoked, he would be relieved to blame this whole thing on the police.

They were met, from behind glass, with the emotionless attention of a
round, mustachioed clerk dressed in police blue, a flag on his sleeve.

Back where he sat, there were cOunters and old desks and a phone that
rang incessantly; the only time it wasn't jangling was when someone was
speaking into it.

They filled out, "subscribed under the penalties of perjury"-the grammar
didn't seem quite right-green forms bristling with the sub position that
they might have things to hide but would confess them here to buy their
way in for a visit: Their true name.  Their own previous felonies.
Whether they were on furlough from another Correctional Institution.
She was overwhelmed with this forced glimpse of just who was out there,
who was in here, how they were related.

Jesus, the perfumed garden she lived in .  .  .  Name of Inmate (the
word shocked her there in print, as if he had already been convicted of
something).  Relationship.  They pushed the forms through a window on a
sliding tray.

They declared they had no weapons-it was clearly time to stop being
astonished or affronted by anything.  Reluctantly, Carolyn hung her
purse in a locker.  (Patients desperately hated to give up their
things-she remembered, from her internship, hOW women who had to take
off their wedding rings before they were rolled intO the operating room
would cry and argue: Not then, of all times, to be stripped of their
familiar identifying tokens, not when they were about to be stripped of
everything, including consciousness!  She felt the leap of anger as she
hung her shoulder bag from a hook and watched Ben empty his pockets of
all his petty jangling treasure.  They were right, it was humiliating
and, separated from her familiar props, she felt herself giving up
defenses she didn't know she had.) They passed through a red
door-cheerful except for the sign that repeated yet again NO FIREARMS
PAST THIS POINT-so thick it was like entering a safe.  Then they were in
the long, uninflected room where they would face their Inmate through
glass, absurdly near him, close enough to see his pores, his every
eyelash.  But brown telephones, ordinary-looking except that like lobby
phones they had no dial, hung beside each chair.

You faced rabbits through a cage, you faced parrots and canaries and
guinea pigs.  You did not face your son.  The glass was impermeably
thick.  She could see fingerprints, cloudy as scummy water, where the
fluorescence flashed against it.  You would have to sit next to other
visitors?  Share conversations about-well, about anything: this was all
you had of each other.  Bail or regret or revenge or-whatever?  "I don't
think anybody stays in here very long, it's not really a prison," Ben
said quietly, as if they were surrounded by listeners.  "It's mostly
pre-trial, so I'll bet people don't stay around forever."

Carolyn looked around, dispirited.  This was not one of those spaces
like hospital waiting rooms that had been furnished with kindness to
keep spirits up-it had a scuffed, plain-wood, businesslike look, no
visual euphemisms here for bad luck, bad judgment, bad karma.  The
attitude, she thought, looked like: You got yourself into this, bud, and
we're not obliged to keep you happy.  Or your family, either.  If that
makes you feel sad or guilty, fine.

They sat for a long time, silent.  There was nothing to say.  Carolyn
leaned on her elbow, her hand over her eyes-the fluorescence, buzzing
slightly, was gi'ving her a headache, and, she thought angrily, there
was nothing to look at, anyway.  For whatever reason, no one else was
visiting yet; a quiet time, a lull.  The longer they waited, the closer
she drifted toward sleepshe felt like someone on a boat bobbing without
sound or movement.  A mercy just now, this suspension.  There was no
before in it, there was no after.  There was no now.

Finally, someone joined them.  A very small woman, quite young, with
curlers under a red-and-yellow flowered kerchief, had entered the room
and, apparently accustomed to the routine, had taken a seat a few berths
down from theirs.  She did not look upset to be there; she chewed gum
vociferously.  She looked as if she might be Italian, or Portuguese,
maybe, given where they were.  She paid them no attention.  After a few
minutes' wait, during which she assiduously picked the polish off the
nails of her left hand, blowing little flakes of pink into the air, a
very thin, wiry young man in baggy gray came out of the lockup to sit
down before her.  She began to speak into her telephone, without
preliminaries, in the tone someone would use who was entirely exhausted
by argument.  Oh my, oh my, Carolyn thought.

Here's someone who's been here too many times, sister or sweetheart;
here's someone who's giving more than she's getting.  They never did
hear the young man's voice but through the glass they watched him suffer
the harangue; he looked exactly as he would have at home in his own
room, bored, hostile, eager to be free of her but not quite willing to
cut her loose.

Jacob was not wearing his own clothes either: real jail or holding cell,
they doled out their shapeless institutional gray; and he was pale.

His hair was tamped down as if he'd just removed his hat.  She tried to
read his face but found it scrupulously blank.

She started to rise and so did Ben, but Jacob's jailers had arranged
things as awkwardly as they could to prevent any unseemly shows of
affection.  It was a sealed border.  They gawked across the distance
like accusers and accused.  To reach for him was impossible.  But there
he was, alive, whole, familiar.

"Cruel bastards," Ben muttered.  They were spared, at least, having to
confront the question of whether, if he could have, Jacob would have
reached forward to fall into their arms.  He stood utterly still,
utterly blank.  Carolyn raked his face for a sign-terror suppressed, or
relief, or the beginning of a grief-stricken crumbling-but she saw a
blankness so pure she had to restrain herself from thrusting herself
through the window and shaking him.  He was very young, she thought
fleetingly, to have such absolute control of himself.  It was hard to
believe this was the moment they'd been praying for.

Ben was the one who was crumbling.  Tears stood out on his cheeks, huge
and copious, and he couldn't seem to stop reaching toward the dead
surface of the glass; he so much needed to touch Jacob, his hands
twitched with balked energy.  "Jacob," he said urgently, then said it
again, and then again, to the air.  No one had touched the phone.

Jacob was looking them over as if to decide whether he wanted to claim
them.

Ben finally reached for the receiver, but the inhumaneness of speaking
through an instrument to someone who sat right before his eyes was too
disorienting to be borne.  "Reach out and touch someone" played under
Carolyn's breath; she didn't dare sing it aloud, but the cruelty of the
joke broke on her like a sweat.  Were they trying to induce madness, or
only accidentally succeeding?

"Jake, we have to talk," Ben said in a conspiratorial whisper.  "Talk to
us." Jacob sat on the edge of the wooden chair.  He did nOt move his
chair in confidingly as his father did nor did he lift his receiver from
its hook.

Carolyn was looking for a familiar sigri in him and hadn't found one. It
was as if someone had done an extraordinarily good job of making a model
of Jacob but could not fake an animating spirit; she didn't recognize
him.

Ben was gesturing to her to join them.  She sat down, hollow.  Are you
all right?  was all she wanted to know, but as if they were in a phone
booth, she would have to wait her turn.  Was he mocking them, or was the
absurdity of this setup too much for him to overcome?  Ben gestured to
him to pick up the telephone as if he might conceivably have failed to
notice that it was there.  The guard who stood against the wall on
Jacob's side must have shouted something to him because Jacob turned to
look at him sideways.  He nodded almost imperceptibly, a flicker that
barely registered, but he still didn't reach for the phone.  Nor could
they force him to.  For someone who didn't want to be dragged into
confrontation, it was a dream too good to be true.

So they stared.  His silence was appropriate to the event, she thought;
it was like a play by Beckettthey needed garbage cans to sit in, or
blackness all around them.  Their stupefied voices would hang out in
space and flap like laundered nightclothes, meaningless.  Meanwhile, in
the real world, was he all right?  Was he in control or had he sustained
some shock, some damaging injury?  "Could we ask them if we can get near
him?" she asked Ben, feeling foolish.  "If we tell them he won't use the
phone?"

Overcome, Ben just shook his head hopelessly.  Jacob was watching them
from the far side, taking it all in.  His eyes followed her as she
walked back to the guard on their side and tried to explain.

"Contact visits are a different day," the guard replied in his
officially flattened machine-voice.  "An inmate has to be here two weeks
before you can She grasped at a straw bobbing past.  "This is just a
boy.  He's seventeen.  It's the first"

"You got to talk to them out front, lady.  Maybe the sheriff will let
you, he's a juvenile." He looked supremely unconcerned.  Other visitors
had begun to crowd into the long, narrow room and he was keeping his eye
on them.  A few who must been been regulars greeted him like an old
friend.

Carolyn liked the way that sentence had come out: so the sheriff was a
juvenile!  She gestured to Ben that she was going out to follow uP on
the possibility.  He had sunk back in his chair, reduced to exhaustion,
and he and Jacob were staring at each other like animals, each waiting
for the other to break and run.  But they were engaged, she thought,
desperate, as she made signs to the clerk to let her out so that she
could find the child-sheriff and get his permission to touch her son.
Wordless or not, Ben and Jacob were having something like a
conversation, hostile but full of feeling.

When she brought back permission-they were to see him in a little room
off to the side, an exception granted only in deference to his age-she
felt triumphant.  Any scrap or bone they threw you in a system like this
was a miracle.

So they had to go out and come back in again.  This time, for their
"contact visit"-it sounded like a sport, maybe, or a sexual encounter-a
woman, unsmiling, passed a metal detector over their bodies gravely and
carefully, turned them as if she were assessing them for crooked hems,
uneven pockets.

"Good Lord," Carolyn murmured, "do they really think we'd be going in
there with a weapon?"

"Hmmp, you can laugh." The woman, unsmiling, continued to vacuum up the
back of her skirt.  "You be surprised what folks'll try to bring in
there.  Youn't believe it." She didn't smile or provide details.

Carolyn was left to ponder: grenades?  pet cats?  nerve gas?

And it was worse.  There was a wide table in the room and Jacob toOk
hasty refuge on the far side and sat down barricaded safely behind it.
As if it were a cloak he could wrap himself up in tight, proof, in his
distance, against touch or feeling or a soaking in hot parental tears,
he sat with two feet of Formica between them and gazed serenely,
expectantly, into their faces.

Was the child in shock?  Could this be some kind of dissociative
reaction?  Carolyn flipped through every possibility she could think of.

His cool assessing glance was chilling.  Carolyn ran ahead of him
constructing explanations: a sufficiency of terror could do this, just
seize up every emotion.  Couldn't it?  He seemed, even without the
glass, to have a transparent shield around him.  She had seen this in
autistic children, a margin of safety, an aura of negative emotional
ions, that turned back curiosity, killed feeling by seeming not to
recognize it.

Or tried to.  It wasn't arrogance; it was incapacity.

"Jacob." Ben had restrained his impulse to seize him, lug him forcibly
into an embrace.  Temperately, he had sat down on his own side and now
merely leaned forward; but he had the deadly sound of fatherly lecturer
in his voice.  "We're relieved to see you safe." No response.  She
wasn't surprised.  "I don't know if you can imagine how much we've been
worrying-" They were all disembodied.  How could it be that he sounded
so insincere about something so palpably, urgently true?  Maybe the
lights in this holding pen were sucking the life out of them, or the
suspicion that they could be heard by strangers?

Ben was trying a new tack, High Jocularity.  "Listen, your sister wanted
us to ask you first off, Jacob-the postcards?  How did you-were you in
all those places?  Did you come back here after you flew all around the
country?  Jake?"

They got a fine edge of a smile for that-he looked distantly amused.

But he wasn't Saying.  Carolyn thought of the voice on the postcards,
that unfamiliar adult chumminess.  That ventriloquism.  He had
apparently thought better of it.

"You don't think you're going to be able to hold out like this forever,
do you?" Ben was beginning to rise to it-he knew he was being provoked,
but knowing it and staying calm in the face of it were two separate
things.  "If you won't talk to us-"

"We've told the police nothing," Carolyn said evenly, to cut off the
badgering.  Ben glared at her.  Probably he thought that was his to say;
she couldn't quite claim it, given her abjectness with Fran.  "Your
father has-protected you." She wished there were some way to measure
what was going on inside him, some internal seismograph, like a lie
detector, she supposed, to show them what this silence was secretly
costing him.  Were they registering, somewhere deep behind his
unchanging eyes?  Amnesia?  Or had he taken a blow to the head?  That
was absurd, but it had to be considered.  "Jacob, look," she began
again, trying for a different tone from Ben's.  "Maybe you can begin by
telling us what they've told you.  Why you're here?"

He looked at her unblinking.  She vowed not to jabber the way you do
when someone doesn't hold up his end of the conversation.  "Do you know
why you're here?"

At this he cast his eyes to the ceiling as if to some mysterious force
above, for relief.  This was a gesture so familiar she breathed out hard
in gratitude.  At least he was functioning.

"Hey, Bartleby," Ben taunted.  "You know Bartlely the Scrivener, did you
ever read that in your English class?  He's the guy who 'preferred not
to." Whatever anyone wanted from him, he just said the same damn thing
over and over.  'I prefer not to.  I prefer not to.  That, Carolyn
thought, will certainly not get us where we have to go.  She was
surprised and maybe a little bit hurt that Jacob didn't give his father
the same fresh have-mercy look.

Ben, who had not even glanced at her, went on to repeat the obvious:
that standing silent was not going to get Jacob out of this.  Poor
child, Carolyn was thinking, even while she wanted to grab him by the
shoulders and shake the words out of him.  Of course he knows that, but
it's probably digging him in deeper.  Panic.  She had frozen, once,
before a committee that was examining her-she was very young, this was
for a scholarship to college.  But she knew what it felt like, at a
certain point it's like wanting to be buried deeper, deeper as long as
you're already dead, to bury your shame.  It had been one of the most
terrifying moments of helplessness of her life-that dim comprehension,
as if through a scrim, through alcohol or pain, that you were doing this
to yourself.  No one else was doing it to you.  It was an animal
response, deer freezing in headlights, raccoon stunned at the side of
the road.  "Jacob," she whispered with feeling.  How could he not answer
the pain in her voice?

Easy or difficult, he resisted.  He looked down at the table where one
of his hands lay.  When he saw it, clean and chapped, a vulnerable part
of himself on display, he pulled it into his lap.  Then he raised his
eyes again and looked at them both without interest, without need or
concern.  Dead in the I es, she thought, weary.  Passive resistance.

"You understand that you have a hearing tomorrow?" she asked brusquely.
"Have they told you that?" I sound like Ben, she thought.

Maybe this would work better if they didn't seem so damned abject.

"There's a warrant for you from New Hampshire.  For your arrest.

Which is why you're here." If things had been normal, he'd have said in
a snide voice, "Aren't I arrested already?" But he persisted in his
silence.  "All they're going to do is determine that you're the person
named in the warrant.  Wendell says that's all they'll do."

"And you may have to say a word or two, Jake, I don't think they're
going to want to talk with you but they may have to ask you who you are,
something like that." This was Ben in a stricken voice.  "I hope you're
ready to say a little more to them, at least." He laughed briefly and
bitterly.  "I think they'll appoint a lawyer for you, you have to have
somebody from here, state of Massachusetts.  Just to make things
complicated.  And when you're back in Hyland we'll get you your real
lawyer and they'll set bail." He looked hard at his son.  "Bail.  To get
you out and home.  But not tomorrow.  I don't know how long that'll
take.  But-" There was a lot more to say but it didn't look as if Jacob
was even listening.  This was a powerful game; for the moment he was
winning it.

Carolyn stood up, hoping Ben would follow without trying to overrule
her.  "Do some thinking overnight about what you plan to say to Wendell
tomorrow, too.  He's coming first thing in the morning.  He'll be here
for the hearing." She gave him a businesslike look.  "Don't waste his
time, Jacob."

That got a little flare out of him-was he affronted that she seemed to
care more about Wendell's time than about his feelings?  Good, then.

Anger would be something.

Ben was coming, too.  He had made the sign "I love you" with his
fingers.  He and the kids knew a little sign language; they enjoyed
signaling to each other in infuriating silence and making her squirm.

"You could learn if you wanted," they teased.  "It's a free country,
nobody's keeping you out." Now Ben waited an extra second to see if,
caught off-guard, Jacob would reciprocate-anything to show a connection.

The guard had begun to come forward as soon as Carolyn pushed back her
chair, and Jacob, apparently without a flicker of temptation to sign a
message back to his father, I love You, or even something noncommittal,
had risen and turned to meet him.  He looked as if he couldn't wait to
leave them, to return to-God, was it an actual cell they had him in?
Were there other men in there, too, sullen-looking boys like the one who
was not looking at that young woman's face, criminals, drunk drivers,
drug pushers?  Whatever was back there, she thought, defeated, too
discouraged even to be able to look at Ben, he seemed to prefer it to
facing his parents.

Ben took her hand as they turned down the street in front of the jail.
He made a noise against his teeth, a sort of sucking tsk as if he was
getting ready to spit something out.  He did that when he was perplexed;
it was an intimate sound, his own wheels grinding.

Carolyn stopped at the corner and held up her hand as if she were only
regathering her breath.  She wasn't at all sure Ben would understand how
she was embarrassed, just then, to be a parent.  It was an absurdity, a
millstone, the way Jacob's intransigence made them into heavies.  She
saw herself as thick-haunched, awkwardly dressed, trammeled by burdens-a
classic out-of-it mother whose child looked past her ear, her
conventional hairdo, her hopeful irrelevance, into the middle distance.

Sometimes, over the years, she had actually enjoyed the tension between
the public role and her private sense of self, which must still somehow
have been locked in unchanging girlhood and independence, traveling
light.

Walking across the gym floor en route to the wooden risers from which
she would watch the school band perform, Jacob in the rear with the bass
drum, or cheering as the Memorial Day parade bore her Judith toward her,
miniature, looming larger until she was full-sized and then away,
dwindling again, to disappear down the street and around the corner,
Judith staring dutifully front, no smile for her parents, her teeth
gritted with the effort of supporting her half of the HYLAND ELEMENTARY
5CH00L flag, yellow on dark green satin.  She would feel the flush of
half-proud, half-embarrassed wonder, sometimes it would raise the hair
on her neck, that she was here, that these children belonged to her,
going through the funny, vulnerable paces of their own childhoods.  Was
it insane to feel so cut in half, so unwhole in the practice of
motherhood?  You think too much, her mother used to tell her.  Just do
it (whatever it was: polishing the silver, dressing for a party,
learning to drive), and stop saying, Isn't it funny to- Her mentor in
high-school biology had said the same thing: Carolyn, don't think about
it, pith the damn frog and be done with it.  He isn't blaming you, and
you don't have to ask what he's feeling just now.  Ditto her college
mentor.  By medical school she had it under control but that didn't mean
she couldn't still be ambushed, when she wasn't expecting it, by
astonishment at where she sometimes found herself: that she had money in
her wallet, big bills, not the quarters she'd saved from her allowance!
That she lay naked on a bed with this swarthy man lowering his head,
groaning with pleasure, to her full-grown breasts!  That she could look
at a child and say, "This boy has a clear case of-" based on the
confluence of three separate symptoms.  "Now, here is what we will do."
And get it right .  .

And now, who were these people (she was part of this awkward unit,
hinged by a little distance her son did not bother to perceive) coercing
this silent angry boy into speech.  Trying to coerce, not even
succeeding.  She saw them reflected back in his eyes, generic parents
-"God, my mom!  My dad!"-she could hear it-and wanted to sit on the edge
of the curb and weep ruin, weep defeat.

She walked beside Ben toward their car without a single word.  Ben was
the one who was weeping, he was so much better at that than she was,
nearly silently, his face washed evenly with tears so thick she was
afraid he would step off a curb into traffic, blinded.  Why couldn't
they come together in their grief and talk about it, she wondered.  Why
were they walking side by side alone?

She needed a cup of coffee to steady herself; they were, God knows, in
no hurry.  They drove until they began to recognize buildings, a modest
comfort, as if, in the neighborhood of the jail, they had been lost in
the woods.  Around Putnam Square, Ben found a parking space.

The musical chairs of commerce kept replacing shops and restaurants with
fresh alternatives-this year's fashions in cuisine and apparel achieved
their fifteen minutes of fortune, if not exactly fame.  Every time they
came down to Cambridge they discovered that an old hair salon had become
an antiques shop or a hardware store had yielded to a bagel bakery. They
headed toward something new called Cafe Old.  Their favorite jumbled
army-navy store (where Carolyn remembered finding a canteen and a set of
flares once for Jacob's Boy Scout trip) had become a wondrously green
flower shop, a dash of tropical green that looked as if it should exude
its steamy sweetness right out onto the frigid street.  Carolyn idly
took in the new arrangement.  Plus ca change, she thought, slowing and
turning for a moment to the window full of flowers for a resuscitating
glimpse of softness and color; it was so thickly beaded with moisture
she could barely make out shapes inside.

Had she not made that abortive turn from their relentless hike, she
would not have seen cARTE BLANCHE next door.  It was narrow and
cluttered, with the dusty moted light of an old bookstore, not the new
breed that features paperbacks at half price, but the real kind, whose
air is thick with the lint of aging paper.  In the window hung the
famous funny etching of the Sutro Baths, all those men in their pastel
one-piece bathing suits standing chatting on scaffolding above the
bluegreen pool.  In the window, books were opened to old, formal
penand-inks and etchings, and ranged before them in fan-shaped designs
like full hands of playing cards lay dozens of postcards, picture side
up.  Carolyn slowed, bewildered, and looked again; Ben was moving on
ahead as if he were alone.

VALENTINES.  VICT0RIANA.  W0RLD CAPITALs.  U.s.  CITIES.

PETs.  FAMoUs FACES.

BLANK CARD5.  QUAINT MEsSAGEs.

F0R CoLLECToRS, F0R CoRRESPoNDENCE.

TIRED 0F THE SAME 0LD B0GEY5 AND MoNRoEs?

WF HAVE I 8,ooo CARDS.  C0LLECTI0N GRowING DAILY!!!!

She called out to Ben to stop.  He turned to her from the entrance to
Cafe' Ole, annoyed.  "Is this the time to go window shopping?"

She hurried to him and took his arm to drag him back.  "You're so damn
predictable," she said, not smiling, and realized her heart was beating
as if it was trying to finish her off once and for all.  "How about a
picture of Al Jolson.  Ginger Rogers?  How about Burns and Allen?

Clarence Darrow?  Buenos Aires?  Benny-" She made herself breathe
slowly, deeply.  "How about Santa Fe?"

When she called the Rapaports she was prepared to give a rudimentary
explanation and invite themselves to stay in their friends' big
Cambridge house for as long as it took.  Discussing Jacob would be the
necessary price of admission but, she thought, there'd be no solace in
It.

The housekeeper answered, whose English was so bad that it hardly seemed
worth leaving her name, let alone a message.  She tried to get Sarah's
and Michael's work numbers, without success.  It may have been her
anxiety of the moment, but she was furious with them for their
fashionable mercies, the knee-jerk charity to the needy that drove them
to a series of encounters (often comic, if you liked that sort of thing)
with problematic employees.  They seemed always to be forced to watch
their yardmen confront New World machinery for the first time, turned
loose upon many-horsepower engines at the edges of their lawn, or to try
to explain the microwave (not to mention the house rules regarding child
behavior) to women who had worn their babies in multicolored slings
they'd woven themselves, who had cooked over pit fires in the mountains
of Ecuador.  They had almost sacrificed Dickie to one of them when he
was tiny: she had left him alone in the bathtub and run to answer the
urgent buzz of the dryer for fear it was getting ready to explode, and
he had gone under for an alarming instant.  Nice people all of them, and
God knows desperate, but in sore need of acculturation.  Today Carolyn
had no patience with the shy, terrified woman who couldn't tell her how
to reach the Rapaports at work, and she had no time to reason it out,
chase them down department by department, Michael at Harvard, Sarah at
Wellesley.

"We'll show up on their doorstep," she told Ben bitterly.  "We'll be
waifs in the night, with luggage, and hope they haven't promised the
guest room to anybody else."

They arrived just as Sarah was raising her head from the trunk of her
car, her arms laden with shopping bags.  "Are you just passing by, you
two?" she called to them cheerfully.  Ben put his little overnight bag
down beside a crusted remnant of snow and went to rescue her from her
packages.  "Don't I wish," he said, and Sarah, holding on to a paper bag
from the posh little gourmet takeout around the corner as if he were
trying to steal it from her, looked at him finally and said, with
suitable alarm, "Benny, what's the matter?"

"Tell you inside," he mumbled.  "Sarah, let me help."

"I'm not used to gentlemen anymore.  She laughed, and yielded it up.  In
spite of the cold, she was bareheaded.  Her short dark hair was
beginning to be striped with gray, as if someone had taken white ink to
it with a ruler, but she still looked like a playful girl.  "Just put
your nose in there, isn't that divine?" Garlic rose up out of the depths
of the bag as dizzying as Scotch on an empty stomach.

They followed her into the shade of late afternoon in a big old house,
which contained the voices of children and television and the smell of
cooking more or less accomplished by "Azula, who is a wonde I l cook.

A little narrow maybe"-Ben and Carolyn threw each other a look"but she
makes some stews you've never dreamed of."

"I don't doubt it," Carolyn said, smiling.  The sight of the tulips in
the center of the dining-room table, a still point, innocent, purple,
cool, was an insult to their own disorder.  The whole house, in fact,
infuriated her today, though she had always loved it.  Michael was a
Japanese scholar, an expert on a dynasty in some century-tenth?

twelfth?  She could never remember; it was as real to him as-well,
maybe, Carolyn thought, World War Il-an event he had just missed
participating in by a few unlucky years.  Having failed to be there in
the flesh, he had collected as many artifacts of the time as they could
afford, and had blended them unsettlingly into the old Cambridge house
with its heavy dark-wood cornices and long, old-fashioned, deepsilled
windows.  The walls were hung with brass gongs and delicately traced
triptychs of mist and mountains; pastel paper screens lopped off
corners, and a luscious dark blue-and-hyacinth silk kimono was stretched
glistening like something wet on the dining-room wall, its arms
outstretched.  Today Carolyn eyed it with irritation-how strange to hang
an empty garment that way, spread-eagled like an invisible Christ on an
invisible cross.

At the last minute, faced with spending a few days with a pretty good
but not intimate friend here in this peculiar one-down situation, Judith
had asked to be left at Celeste's house in Hyland.  "At least," she had
said angrily, turning from their proffered kisses, "I don't have to
explain anything."

Preparing to explain it to Sarah as she unpacked her groceries, made
requests of her son, answered her daughter's phone call from school,
where soccer practice was running late, started a salad, stirred Azula's
mystery stew with a perplexed expression-"Where does she get the
ingredients?" she asked the pot aloud-they understood Judith's
reluctance.

"Maybe we should wait till Michael's home, so we don't have to go
through things twice," Ben began.  This was a very ascetic kitchen, pure
white, always clean, its decorations beautifully controlled.  In this
room the children's best drawings were neatly framed, with an air of
permanence that honored kindergarten art as an absolute.  In it, Judith
thought, Ben looked hot and sweaty.  He looked like an emotional
desperado.  He looked like a Jew among the British.

"Won't have to go through what twice?" Sarah stopped stirring.

"Are you sick?  Are you here for tests?  I at?"

Their glances at each other crested, this time, together.  However
distant they might feel from moment to moment, the world kept flinging
them back against each other, hard.  "Jacob's in some trouble," Ben
began carefully, and Carolyn closed her eyes so that she could hear his
familiar welcome voice and not have to see the first wash of
comprehension across her friend's face, or notice whether she took a
step backward, literally or figuratively, before politeness and concern
propelled her toward them to seize them in her arms, whispering empty
comfort.

She was good, though.  She commiserated without gush, and inquired
without pushing.  Sarah was a professional responder.  She was a dean at
Wellesley, a job she routinely defined as "full-time role model."
Carolyn was always a little bemused by the idea of the contentlessness
of such a position-she had imagined that role models actually had to do
something of their own besides offer generic inspiration.  (She had, for
example, spoken before enough groups to know that she was, for young
women, an irresistible representative of the Medical Profession.)  But
apparently that was an outmoded prerequisite.

Sarah, without asking if they wanted any, brought them glass mugs of
steaming cider, spiked, and handed it around with a look that said,
Anything you think you need is fully justified.  But she was not
sentimental about it.  The only time she flinched was when Carolyn told
her about their trip to see Jacob in the lockup.  "Literally, not one
word!" she repeated, ready for outrage.  Obviously, it was easier to
picture teenage recalcitrance than bloody crime.  Who could blame her.

"Not one word." Carolyn put her mug down fast and covered her wet eyes
with her hands and Sarah hurried to put her arms around her.

"He'll come around, Car.  He's got to.  He'll need you something awful.
Later.  You'll see."

Against her rough cotton shoulder Carolyn could cry, surprised and
relieved, as if, after much useless agitation, a stopper had come
unstuck.  She supposed she was free to relax here because Sarah had
listened to them without seeming too thoroughly appalled.  The more
astonished and effusive people were, the further they were from
understanding.  No one who gawked at them, however sympathetically,
could remember they were still connected, in spite of it all, human.

Maybe it was distance-maybe down here Sarah was just far enough away
from Hyland so that the only community she cared about was Ben and
Carolyn together.  Or maybe it was her profession as neutral listener,
full-time waterproof shoulder.  Somehow, Ben might put it, she had the
moves.

When Michael came home they watched him shuck his suit, his tie, his
shirt, his shoes, and thrust his bare pink toes, showing out under his
cuffs like little shrimp, into paper slippers.  This was ritual; he
looked oppressed before he had himself in place for his evening.  Then
he sat stupefied in the wake of their news.

But not for long.  Michael was made for taking people and situations in
hand; he organized and improved them, he saved people from the folly of
their own arrangements and made connections.  He traded up.

"We've got to get you a better lawyer than the court-appointed nonentity
they're going to give you."

"But they said it didn't matter for this," Ben protested.  "This isn't
his real lawyer, Mike, this is pure procedure, tomorrow.  Is he Jacob
Reiser, that's all they need to know.  Is he the person named in the
warrant.  Does he waive an extradition hearing.  A notary could do it,
if they'd let him."

Michael looked at him shrewdly.  "Never believe a petty official, I mean
a time-server bureaucrat who talks to you in a public building, about
anything that matters.  I wouldn't trust them if I had a traffic ticket,
and look what you're facing here.  Ben.  Please." He usually knew best,
somehow, and at a certain point people tended to yield to his judgment.
The cost was that they also tended to feel themselves a little careless
in the light of his care, a little unreasonable under the soothing balm
of his logic.  Ben sometimes resented having things taken out of his
hands, but Carolyn recognized, now, by the way she felt herself, how
exhausted he was, far out beyond the reach of pride.

How grateful.  Michael furrowed his very handsome brow-his face was
actually getting better-looking as time took the prettiness out of his
features and replaced it with perfected concentration, seasoned earnest
concern-and thought about what they needed.

They went up to bed fairly early.  Depression, Sarah certainly
understood, was fatiguing.  She followed them up the long polished-wood
stairway carrying a bowl of fruit, fetched them towels, and finally
brought them the little television set that usually sat surrounded by
clutter in Dickie's room.  "School night," she said.  "He surely doesn't
need this." She put it on the painted oak dresser and plugged it in.

"Watch Letterman or something stupid," she advised.  "You could probably
use a chicken that can jump through a hoop or an interview with Tiny
Tim." Then, probably because she recognized that she was treating them
like will-less children, she backed off.  "Last thing, I promise.  Do
you need an alarm clock?  Actually, the general mayhem around here in
the morning would wake the dead."

Thank God, Carolyn thought, she didn't blush at that.  People did, as if
all of death were theirs to feel responsible for.  "We're fine," she
said.  "Relax, Sarah.  We'll be okay.  Really." Sarah came forward to
give her a brief kiss on the cheek.  Oh, the helplessness of friends, it
was another burden for which she felt guilty.  "I'm sorry to have
just-dumped this on your doorstep," she said.  "You didn't need this."

"Ha!" Sarah smoothed the hair off Carolyn's forehead.  "Well, I don't
suppose you did either, did you?  I tell my kids life is what happens
when you've made other plans.  But look, we're all caught in a net
together, you know.  And I never like to regret that.  I just wish we
could do more to help."

Carolyn shooed her out the door.  "At least let me not feel responsible
for having you fall asleep at work tomorrow.

"Oh, what a lovely idea.  My head down on my desk, my shoes off, dozing.
I'd thank you if you could arrange it."

Ben had turned on the television, on which some diaphanous fabric was
sweeping across the faces of the MTV dancers, a sea of swirling pastel
waves, like the movement of clouds blown by a high wind, the music
rising and falling with them.  It looked like a pageant some arty
third-grade teacher might assemble in which dozens of hapless obedient
children dragged across the stage flowing sheets their mothers had
tiedyed.

Carolyn let down her skirt, pulled off her sweater, and stood in a kind
of bewilderment in the center of the room.  Occasionally she found
herself forgetting what was happening, what had brought about all this
effort, this nimbus of pain that surrounded everything.  Objectless
depression, the sense, merely, that things were not as they ought to
be-it could become its own habit.  Sometimes she passed into a merciful
blankness, like standing sleep.

When she returned, refocused, she saw Ben staring at her, naked, from
the side of the bed.  He hadn't looked at her that way since all this
began; they had not made love once since the day Jacob disappeared.  She
had thought, many an evening, that it would be a mercy to lie comforted
in each other's arms; it would he a promise of continuing life.  But
they were dry as sun-parched bones, and faintly disgusted at the thought
of damp and dark and pleasurable touch.

Swamp was what she saw when she thought of sex these days.  Provocation.
Danger.  She saw that blond head defiled, however indirectly, by sex.
Without a word of testimony, she was sure of it.

That may have been why there was something almost angry in Ben's eyes
right now, something more like lust than the sweet invitation she was
accustomed to.  Lust always had a little blame in it, she thought; a
little sense of helpless entrapment.  She turned away embarrassed.

But the MTV was off and he was beside her, and the way he turned her to
him did not promise gentleness.  His hands were everywhere on her, every
part of him awake and anxious.  He didn't say a word.

She didn't resist.  Confused, not sure whether this was a violation or
his reading of a need of hers more secret than even she could
acknowledge, she let him chafe her skin pink under his rough carpenter's
hands and lay her back across the edge of the bed, where he pinned her
desperately to the pink-and I reen garlands on the sheets.

He took no time with her, so that he had to rip his way in, and he
howled when he came.  He sounded like a man felled from behind by
surprise.  Far, far from herself she felt nothing but wonder at their
animal selves.  His.  Hers, just now, was all too human, too conscious,
and when she heard the distant laughter and elated voices of the
television set on the other side of the wall, or maybe downstairs in the
den-wherever it was, it testified to how sound traveled even in this
well-built old house-she was mortified.  Little Dickie lying in his bed,
bereft of his television set, wondering if someone-someone elsewas being
murdered in the room next door.  The rest of them not daring to look at
each other, forced to listen.

She moved herself angrily to dislodge the weight of Ben's body from
hers.  She glared at him.  "What a pefformance," she said.

"What?" Sweat stood everywhere on him, his head, his shoulders drenched.

"Well, they certainly know you're still alive and functioning."

Ben breathed in hard as if she'd slapped him.  "I don't know why it
would have occurred to them I'm not.  Anyway, what the hell do I care
what they think?"

"I don't know, you tell me.  But since Michael makes everybody feel sort
of like a helpless kid, I suppose you had to assert a little-I mean,
that wasn't exactly private."

"Oh Jesus." He took her hand and held it, and hung his head down over
his furred chest.  "You think that, hunh?" He closed his eyes and swayed
a little like a man at prayer.  "Won't anything ever be the same again?
Carolyn?  This will sound sentimental, I know, but-we're here in
this-this normal house.  I see these two people who can get into bed
together at the end of the day like ordinary people and enjoy each
other, make love like-friends, whatever you want to call it-and then
turn over and go to sleep and not have dreams with battered heads in
them and see the straps of electric chairs and-last night, I didn't tell
you, I saw Jacob's ashes on an altar." He looked away, squinting at the
memory.  "It was the bimah in the little synagogue where my father used
to take me, and everybody was bending over this towel withI know it was
Jacob-the way we bent over him at his bris." He spoke without looking at
her.  He kneaded her fingers hard.  "Not everybody has to go to bed to
that.  So I looked at the two of them, those two fucking lucky people,
and I thought, That's what they're going to do when they go to bed
tonight, they're going to think about us, poor schmucks who are in such
trouble, and they're going to reach out for each other and celebrate
their good luck.  So I reached for you.  So.

I'm sorry."

He lay down and turned his back to her.  She sat with her arms around
herself because it had gotten cold; they must have turned the thermostat
down before they went to bed.  She put her hand out and touched his
back, but he hadn't cooled down yet.  Under the field of wildflowers on
the comforter he was burning like a man delirious with fever.

Celeste was in love with Jacob and she made it clear to Judith that
"this thing" that had happened (ii in fact, it really had; she had her
doubts) was hardly enough to change her mind about him.  If anything, it
seemed to make him a hero in her eyes.  Her light blue gaze drifted a
little when she talked about him, the way it did when she thought up
dopey stories in which she bumped into rock stars in unlikely places,
was instantly recognized as the hidden princess of their dreams, and
packed off with them to an endless island honeymoon.  Her stories ended
with tearful scenes when they had to return to the world to attend to
their careers-she was good at threatening, at having them choose her
over ten I ity tours.  When the New Kids on the Block challenged the
Cure for her love, it was like a glorious gang fight.

Celeste, a little pudgy, her nc-color hair soft and curly as a baby's,
her bust fast developing too large a life of its own, dreamed up these
tales like a fortune-teller gazing into a cloudy 26-inch full-color
crystal ball.

If she wanted to go on with this love nonsense, Judith thought, that was
her business.  But when Celeste's parents dropped them on line at the
movies in Howe, she didn't appreciate Celeste's stage whisper to some
boys from school who were a few spaces ahead, "Hey, you know Judith,
don't you?  Her brother is Jacob ReUer." Because Celeste was so stupidly
sincere, this was meant as the highest recommendation, as if Judith was
the real celebrity here.  But one of the boys looked sick and made a
gesture as if he was going to let go of his dinner, and after a rude
once-over, a large, heavy, red-eared kid named Rex said evenly, "My dad
says they ought to do something to them to make that sicko give himself
up."

Judith was confused by all those theys and thems-who was supposed to be
doing what to whom?  And why would "that sicko" give himself up because
of it?

Celeste only looked irritated.  "Rex!" She stamped her sneaker as if she
were flirting.  Judith moved behind her and turned her head away.

Celeste thought she was doing her a favor, acting natural (if you could
call it that).  After the movie, Judith was going to have a talk with
her.

She couldn't pay attention to what was on the screen, she only heard the
grate and clamor of overexcited voices and occasionally the
selfcongratulatory clangor of cars exploding into each other.  Instead,
she saw her brother, very small, being yanked around violently in
handcuffs, she saw him surrounded by crowds who were taunting him like a
cornered animal, poking him with sticks.  She tried to think of other
things, the way she did when she went to the dentist, but nothing came.
She saw Brian, the boy she liked just then, but he wouldn't look at her.
She picked through the clothes on the rack at the Open Trunk as if she
were pulling them aside one by one, turning up their price tags.  What
she saw was Martha Taverner, who worked next door to the Open Trunk at
Jacey's, leaning over the ice-cream pails.  Saw what everyone was
thinking, Martha somewhere in bed or in the backseat of the Dodge with
no clothes on, and Jacob looking like the brother who had shocked her
years ago with his naked body, and he was approaching Martha shrieking
with that jack in his hands.  Everyone, the last few weeks, had been
picturing her brother stark-naked -they were all working on the same
humiliating story.  Probably the details differed, but the story was the
two of them doing what they weren t supposed to be doing and then
fighting, somehow.  Then she saw Martha lying in the ground with dirt on
her eyes, turning to bones, her dress and her shoes all falling away,
everything falling away, and Jacob still out there somewhere.  Under The
Spirit of St.  Louis, against a pillar in Santa Fe.  She refused to see
him crying in her mother's arms right now, retching, facing what he'd
done.  She coughed once, twice, to keep herself from whimpering out
loud.

Celeste was shoving popcorn at her.  "No, it's okay," she said.

"Thanks." She'd have choked.  She wished she had no body, either to eat
or dress or take to the bathroom.  She knew she would never let a boy
touch her.  There were no Jewish nuns, but maybe she could begin a-it
was called holy orders, wasn't it?  You could do good for people but you
wouldn't have to get married, and no one could try to get near you. That
would be the closest thing to having no body.  She didn't like having
breasts, they hurt all the time, and although they weren't big enough to
be cumbersome yet and might never be-it was strange not to know what
you'd be shaped like forever-she watched Celeste trying to figure out
how to lie on hers comfortably, and failing.

The boys she knew sat with their hammy legs wide apart all the time,
hogging space.  Or else they were skinny little nerds who looked like
they were still in third grade.  The big ones belched and sweated as if
they were enjoying stomping across the world-why wouldn't they be, no
one discouraged them from it.  And it wasn't just the farm kids either,
the ones who did chores before class and came in smelling of manure.  It
was all the boys, or mostly.  (Not Brian.)  The idea of one of them
going inside her was too creepy even to think about, it was too totally
disgusting.  This had nothing to do with her brother, it was her
independent thought and she had begun on it quite a while before this
mess.  Anyway, Jacob was at least somewhat delicate compared to most of
them, he seemed light-boned and clear-faced next to boys like that Rex,
the beefy and flatulent kind.  Jacob didn't think farting was especially
funny or that it proved his unique skill; when he stood in front of her
he didn't block the light.

Whatever hostile brain waves Judith was sending out during the endless
chaos of the movie, Rex didn't receive them.  When she and Celeste had
walked up to the top of the aisle, he was waiting there with his crew.
"Hey, you want us to drive you home?" he asked neutrally, as if he
didn't really care what answer they gave.

"My parents are picking us up," Celeste answered.  "They went to eat and
they're coming back to get us." She actually sounded regretful.

"We'll take you for pizza." Rex put on a hopeful look that made Judith
queasy.  "Tell them we'll bring you right home.  We'll just stop at
Midtown for some slices."

Celeste gave Judith a rhapsodic stare.  This was why she had put blue
shadow around her eyes.  She seemed to be saying the New Kids on the
Block are birds in the bush but here are some real boys in the hand.  Or
almost.  Or planning to be.  "We'll talk about it," Celeste offered.
"Wait a minute." She pushed Judith against the wall under the glassed-in
fire extinguisher.  "Don't you want to?" Her question was a statement,
nearly an order.

"Celeste, those boys are gross.  That Rex looks like a-ham." She had
wanted a more disgusting and original word, but you could never find one
when you needed one.  His hands seemed to be attached to his arms, the
widest part, without any wrist in between.  His neck was wrinkled like a
fat old man's.  He probably had a spare tire, white and freckled.  He
reminded her of lard.

"They're okay.  What are you, scared?"

She was, a little.  Old warnings bobbed to the surface of her memory,
cautions against getting into cars, going with strangers, letting boys
get close enough to touch.  Well, they had gone off to Cambridge without
her, so a lot they cared.  Anyway, who said these characters would get
to touch?

"Why should I be scared?" The fire extinguisher stood out for her like
an object in a museum; she stared at it.  F0R EMERGENCY USE oNLY.

Her father could use it, make something funny out of that nozzle.  Its
wound hose was like some flat coiled living thing.  "Lester, I really
don't feel good.  I'd rather go home."

Celeste shook her by the arm.  'Jude.  We'll just pick up some"-she used
Rex's word as if it were her own-"slices."

Judith remembered that she was a guest, and not in a good position to
argne.  She followed listlessly.  Out in front, Celeste dismissed her
parents, who seemed to think it was cute that these boys, real ones, not
daydreams, were showing an interest.  Celeste's mother, she suspected,
already feared for her daughter's social life: she was always on her to
lose what she called her "chubbies," learn to dance, take an interest in
makeup.  Her own mother had a fit when she put on makeup.

"There's time enough," she always said, implying there was time enough
for a lot of things.

One of the boys had a car.  What was a sixteen-year I ld doing out with
these eighth-grade turkeys?  She suppressed the question.  The back of
the car, where she sat sullenly between three of them, squashed between
down jackets, was thick with smoke and sweat.  The driver, named Kenner
or Canner or something close, was gunning his motor at the stoplight on
the highway.  Before it had finished turning, he took off so fast her
insides rattled.  Celeste was chattering away, but no one seemed to be
listening; they conducted their own stop-start but nonsto I umb
conversation right over her.  This is what it's going to be, Judith
thought, hunching around her anger.  Everyone she knew was going to
arrange their lives to make room for creeps like these just because they
wore pants.  Her brother had once said, "Well, kid, you can't understand
that until you really like someone-I mean really like someone.  Then
everything that looks stupid makes sense.  You'll be surprised." He
always had a girl around to like, either up close or from afar; he'd
been having crushes as far back as she could remember.

Maybe she was a slow learner.  Or there was something wrong with her.
She knew that some girls like other girls that way-Dana Parry and a
strange mutant who called herself C.  Sharp, who looked like neither a
girl nor a boy, were found once in the same gym shower and dragged off
to a very public suspension.  She couldn't fignre out just what they did
with each other; they didn't seem properly equipped to do much.  And
she'd heard about it, of course, on television.  But she didn't like
girls like that.  She thought about Celeste trying to kiss her or hold
her close in any way more intimate than their old chumminess that gave
them a lot of reasons to hug, and it disgusted her.

But boys, made for poking and preening, disgusted her even more.

She didn't like anyone like that.  If that made her abnormal, she could
live with it.

They were driving past Derby Lake, slow going behind a long line of
cautious drivers; much more rocking and gliding around those curves, 5
after 5, and she'd be sick.  But then they were turning up the hill road
away from the lake that, farther on, ran past the grand estates.  Very
Old Money lived up here, mostly in the summer, and psychiatrists who
must charge a lot to pay for their stables, and people who owned
factories.  A newspaper editor who had something called a villa had once
bought one of her father's sculptures and put it out in his garden. When
her dad went to visit it after about a year the man was very apologetic
because it was covered solid with bird droppings.

She sat up and looked out anxiously.  Rex was puffing ostentatiously on
what he kept calling a reefer.  "You want some?" He held it under her
nose; it smelled like burning hay.  Her brother did that sometimes-he
once sprayed room freshener all over his clothes to get the smell out
before their parents came home, so then he smelled like lilies of the
valley.  "Get that away from me!" Judith shook her head more to dislodge
the heavy smell than to refuse it.  She turned so hard she heard her
neck snap like a popped joint.  They were passing huge dark houses fast,
rushing past tennis courts-she couldn't see them but she knew-and triple
garages and shapely little artificial ponds.

The moon was barely showing on the horizon, lazily making its apearance,
and there wasn't much light on the snow in the outstretched fields.

She ought to have been complaining-this wasn't the way to Midtown Pizza,
for sure.  But she felt weighed down by loneliness and talking seemed a
great effort.  Her parents were hours away.  Her brother was not with
them, not yet.  Her strange, harsh, delicate brother, part of every day
of her life, and he might have killed someone.

He might have wanted to hurt her, someone he really liked.  And he might
have to die for it.  She had to go over this again and again, and every
time it ended up with Martha's face, insofar as she remembered it, and
little handfuls of dirt on her eyelids.  Maybe if she let herself see
that often enough she'd get bored with it and let it go.  She wasn't
bored yet.  She wanted more than anything to open the door and roll out
of the car into the snow.  But the door was next to Celeste, who was
giggling strangely.  She had puffed on that stupid reefer, or she
wouldn't be sounding so dumb and out of control.  She was talking about
whether Madonna looked better blond or brunette, as if anyone could
care.

Judith closed her eyes and felt like something hurtling through space, a
falling star, a comet getting faster and faster.  Her body was very far
away.  She didn't ever want to stop.  They spun out once, she could feel
the wheels lock and the car do a huge slow helpless circle on the ice
while everyone just said "Oooooh!" as if they were at an amusement park.
"Do it again!" Rex shouted.  "Go back and jam the brakes, man!"

The driver ignored him.  Celeste sighed.  Judith had just seen Dr.
Zhivogo on video and this was like flying across the steppes in a
carriage, only warmer.  (If she said that, Celeste would squeal, "Omar
Shari[ those eyes!") They hurried on a little farther and then she felt
the car turning, this time on purpose, into a driveway that seemed to go
on for a mile.  When they lurched to a stop she opened her eyes, saw
nothing but the bulk of a huge dark house, wished she could close them
again and sleep.  "Get out," Rex said to her roughly and pushed her arm
with his knee.  "You're so dumb you're up shit's creek and you don't
even know it."

No one had a key to the house, but Canner went around to the back, and
after a long wait in a hard wet cold that ate at her toes, he opened the
front door for them from inside.  "Enter my palace," he said grandly,
with a sweep.  "The master is at home."

The boys and Celeste walked respectfully around the ground floor of the
house, their boots and sneakers dropping pools of dirty water on the
carpets.  Judith stood slumped near the door, not even curious.

She had seen beautiful houses before; at the moment Chinese bowls and
claw-footed sideboards did not interest her.  What were they doing here?
Were these gawking boys, who were fingering everything they could get
their hands on, going to begin fingering her and Celeste next?

One part of her was terrified and sickened at the thought; but the
larger, stronger part was very far away, quite calmly watching herself
and them, and the miniature cannon they here playing with, handing
around as if they were trying to decide whether to buy it.

"You hve here?" Celeste asked, her eyes goggling.

"Yeah," Rex said from across the long room.  "We live here and I'm the
King of England."

Whose house was this?  She was not going to ask.  She wasn't going to
say a single word.  Canner was staring wide-eyed as a small child into a
grandfather clock as if it were a shop window.  "When's the hour,
dammit?" he asked.  "I want to hear this mother say something."

They moved around the room impatiently, laying their hands on everything
just because no one could tell them not to.  Finally Rex said, "Okay,
where do you think they keep the fuckin phone?"

Celeste stopped short.  She was holding a huge glass apple too lightly
in her hands.  "What do you want the phone for?  Are you calling in our
order?"

This made all of them laugh, but Judith knew Celeste hadn't been
kidding.  One of the boys, a blond so fair he seemed to have no
lashes-she thought of her white guinea pig-stood by so quietly she could
see he didn't want to participate any more than she did.  "Just how're
you gonna do this?" he asked Rex anxiously.  He was a follower, that was
clear.  A weak sister, Rex probably thought.

"Simple," Rex answered.  "Cinch, okay?  We just call and say she's been
kidnapped, is all.  We say 'Get the word out,' like, on the TV news and
all, and tell him if he turns himself in they get her back.

Otherwise, we keep lier." He cast her a long look.  "And who knows what
we do to her." His jacket was open on a dusty blue T-shirt; all she
could read of it said "yours too." He shrugged.  "El cincho."

"And we don't want money.  Remember that," Canner added earnestly.
"We're just the vigilantes here." He was a tall skinny boy with short
hair that stood up like the metal filings in a magnet game she used to
have.  You could take a little stick and organize piles of black dots
under the screen; she used to pave heads with straight u I anddown hair.
Judith knew she ought to be alarmed, but she seemed to be seeing them
through the wrong end of a telescope.  This was all so stupid she stayed
very calm; she felt a vast condescending superiority before these
self-important fools.  They wanted to be criminals obviously, but they
weren't very smart.  And they seemed to be making up the script as they
went along.  If they didn't use their muscle on her, she could surely
manage them.  She wondered if she ought to tell them first that Jacob
was in custody already or let them make their phone call and get
themselves in trouble.

"Y'know," the blond boy was saying, wetting his lips nervously.

Judith wondered if he was officially an albino.  When he spoke, his
whole face was as red as shredded flesh.  It looked like it must hurt.

"Y'know, you get the death penalty for kidnapping."

"Yeah, well, this is in the line of duty, isn't it?  We're helping the
cops with this thing, since they seem to be fucking up, as usual.  It's
not just, like, kidnapping.  You know what I mean?  It's for a cause.

Canner stared at the blond boy as if to frighten him into agreement.

"I don't know," he was saying.  A bit of a whiner.  She was on his side
in this, but she could see how annoying he might be.  "This is-" Judith
couldn't believe her own voice.  "You can save your trouble, dummies. My
brother's already in jail, if you want to know." She wanted to tell them
they weren't up to a life of crime, but she decided they'd figure that
out soon enough themselves.

"Where?  How come we never heard?" They turned on her, all of them.

Rex refused to believe her.  Canner said, "Why should we believe you?
You just want to get out of here."

"Well, then," she said, smiling, "go ahead and call.  I don't have
anything to lose if they laugh at you down there.  Go ahead." She ran
her hand along the smooth back of a brocade chair.  It was cool and
solid.  "Get yourself in trouble.  Fine with me." All she wanted to do
was go lie down somewhere, and feel the nothing she had discovered in
the speeding car.  She wondered distantly if this was the kind of
nothing that led people to commit suicide.  Were you trying to make that
nothing permanent?  Was that all it was?

Maybe, she thought, they would trash the house, since they had no other
reason to be here now.  It was disappointing, really.  They didn't seem
inclined to do anything.  Whoever the house belonged to, they acted like
invited guests, except that Rex pocketed the miniature cannon and the
blond boy accidentally knocked an egg-it was one of those expensive
permanent Easter eggs, crisscrossed with fabric and gold paint I ff an
end table and watched it shatter at his feet.  His poor dead-white face
colored again, an extraordinary throbbing red like food coloring rising
up a paper towel, spreading evenly through it.  She felt protective
toward him because he could hide nothing, and with these creeps who were
his friends that was like walking around naked.

But they didn't frighten her anymore.  She went to Canner, who had the
keys.  "You better drive us home now," she said, planting herself right
in front of him, limb for limb, praying she wouldn't blush or sound like
she was begging.  "Or you're going to get in a lot of trouble."

He didn't even argue, just rounded them up with a single sweep of his
arm.

So they went home, morose and silent.  She knew they wouldn't try
anything else with her, she had made them look so pathetic.  Celeste,
who had never quite decided whether to be angry or scared or one of the
girls, muttered to Judith her disappointment at missing out on those
pizza slices.  (God, Judith thought, she's ruined.  She will never be
thin.)  Celeste thanked them when they stopped to let the two of them
out at the foot of her driveway, the motor racing, Canner's foot
twitching heavily on the gas even while they idled.  Judith said
nothing.

She felt vaguely triumphant-the only words she had uttered had been the
news of her brother's capture, her opinion of the stupidity of their
little adventure, and the order to take them home.  She walked away from
the car as fast as she could.

She was ready to erase the failed gangsters from her mind, but this was
going to put a crimp in her friendship with Celeste, there was no
ignoring it.  Celeste wanted to be one of those girls who-she had heard
her mother use the phrase and she liked it-would lie down in front of a
regiment.  That was such a funny, terrible thing to imagine.  She saw
Celeste on her back in a dusty field, all flesh like a slug without its
shell, her quivery thighs and new doughy breasts in the harsh light, and
a huge crowd of boys in khaki, a whole platoon with the short hair of
new recruits, comes marching right across her, carrying the flag.  They
don't even stop to do her harm.

The hard part, Judith thought when they had gone to bed in silence,
pretending to be quiet because of the sleeping household, was that she
knew she wouldn't even tell her parents what had happened.  Or hadn't.

What might have.  They were having enough trouble with what really had,
and worse yet, with what was going to.  Anyway, she thought, except for
the first minute or two, she hadn't even been frightened.

But it was strange.  (The pillow was so soft under her head she felt as
if she were sinking backward into the bed.  It reminded her she wasn't
home.)  Crime used to be a television word, or something you met in
games or in the movies.  You watched murderers and raspy-voiced
detectives instead of the fairies she remembered from kids' books.  Cars
flying through space took the place of flying carpets and witches on
broomsticks-fantasy land!  But that wasn't real crime.  .  .  Now it was
as if one awful act led to another, or brought it on, even if this
stupid prank wasn't anything but boys pretending.  There was something
contagious about it, and she knew it wouldn't end until her brother had
been hurt, and badly.  (Or someone else, if they were lucky.  She
knocked on the wood beside the bed, she always did that, just in case,
when she was wishing.  You never know.)  But someone would pay: A crime
for a crime.

She had sometimes wanted to be an only child, like Celeste.

She was altogether alone, and even when they all came home, she knew,
bringing him or not bringing him, it didn't matter, she would be more
alone still.

Why were they all hooked together so that no one could get free?

Why couldn't you just say, "I don't know anything about that, don't look
at me"?

He was a special boy.  A high-quality, sensitive, handsome, complicated
boy.  She thought of sloppy Rex and Canner, shifty and
unhealthy-looking, and that blond guinea pig, and saw beside them the
slender, fine-featured, well-shaped, smart-mouthed Jacob she loved.

She had to jam her knuckles in her mouth to keep from crying out,
cursing him.

Cats, I thought-there was all too much time for thought-have it best:
pure pleasure, pure distress.  No rumination, no regrets.  Snappy the
cat was my idol of the moment.  When she rolls over on her back, the way
horses do, only far more gracefully, a little wave peaking and curling
over itself, she is the most joyful thing alive.  When I do something
nasty to her, yank her head back to jam a pill between those sharp teeth
or grab an illegal chicken wing out of her mouth and cuff her across her
narrow little behind for being a thief, she registers no memory of it,
and keeps none.

By which I mean, I was beginning to have serious doubts about my part in
all this, and I couldn't aflord to.

Carolyn told me how angry Jacob had been about the prom, when I'd tried
to get him to recognize unnecessary self-indulgence, if only he'd let
himself look at it honestly.  Her take on it was not that I was wrong to
be appalled-limos, drinking-and-driving, the whole bit that leaves kids
maimed, dead, and at the very least impoverished-but that I ought
somehow to have taught him better by now, other ways: "Coming down hard
on him now-decent end, indecent means, not only ineffective but, you
know, counterproductive." And more.  "It never worked, your rage with
him.  Some kids can take it, Jacob never could.  He'd fix on the anger,
not on the cause of it.  Just shut down.

And you'd go on.

"Why didn't he learn froni me what matters, then?  What's worth that
kind of money, and that reckless endangerment?  Why hasn't he had the
pride to want to buy his own gas all this time, his clothes, his
records?  Why did he have to make me into a shrieking capitalist heavy?"

"Make you?"

"Make me, yes.  Who are the fathers whose sons grow up understanding
their family's values, anyway?" He said I was worse than the dads who
wore plaid pants and played golf and went to Rotary meetings.  He hated
the way that was at odds with the figures I put out in the garden to
scare the marauders, the Junk Patrol that clattered like no wind chimes
you ever heard, to keep the birds and raccoons away.

My tin men with their noisy armor flapping.  "What does one thing have
to do with the other?" I'd ask him.  "I just want you to pay your own
way.  Nobody paid mine."

"Think about that," he'd say.  We went through this a couple of dozen
times over the years, livid and sputtering, until he stopped responding
and just stood like one of my statues and tuned it out.

"Think about it, you're not hang-loose.  That's just a pose.  You're
Grandpa all over again.  You just think you're liberated.  Hip.  Funky.

Under the jazz and the wet paint and the Do Your Own Thing, you're a
goddamn patriarch."

The curse word of the age.  The conversation stopper.

Am I?  Was I?  I wanted them to grow up independent.  They're supposed
to want to be independent.  Why should my son be crippled by privilege?
Even modest middle-class privilege sucks the juices, blunts the will-I
don't want him taking anything for granted because we made it too easy.
So we'd talk about hypocrisy.  "How about you?tt I'd ask him.  "How
about wanting everything done for you, paid for, but you get to call all
the shots." At which point Carolyn would point out from the sidelines
that he's still a child, Ben, how can we not support him, he's in high
school.  "But he wants the privileges of an adult," I'd insist, and have
to feel petulant when I knew I wasn't the hypocrite here.  It was
embarrassing to be caught in the claws of such an old conflict.  But I
wanted him strong; I wanted his own muscle to hold him up.  Does that
make me a reactionary?

I asked Tony Berger if he thought I was a throwback.  He laughed and
said, "Oh, Ben, you know real patriarchs don't bake quiche."

I told him I was serious.  I think of myself as nurturant, loving.  I
thought I was giving them encouragement, structure, and a minimum of
rules, so they won't grow up soft.  "It's a narcissistic generation out
there, I don't want one of those I-me mall-babies."

"I know, I teach plenty of them," Tony said.  "Even up here.  Designer
brains.  But you've got a style of excess," he told me, "that's the
thing.  A heavy hand.  Sometimes he doesn't know where the power's
coming from, it's like a hard wind blowing.  You know that."

I didn't.  I knew they sometimes hated it, but I didn't think they hated
me.

"I love you anyway, pal, and you're no worse than the rest of us
inconsistent bastards, but.  .  .,' But was the last word he used.

I took to my bed that day.  I had no breath, I felt like I'd fallen.

"Winded," we called it when I was a kid and seemed to spend half my time
getting tripped.  Tripping myself.  I lay in bed under the china-blue
quilt and saw one scene after another in deadening threein-the-morning
kitchen light.  I studied my son's face, the way it closed up on me,
shuttered, shaded, blinded, all my hopes and intentions misheard.
Mis-said?  I feel like my last word to the world, like Tony's to me,
will only be confusion: But.

Every time we had to do something new and intolerable I said to myself,
"They had to shop for a coffin."

"They had to tell her grandparents." This was a good corrective for
self-pity.  I had to resort to that, the whole set of those, when we
went looking for the bail we were going to need.

Jacob has a trust fund, modest, from his grandparents.  Carolyn's side,
obviously.  But it's very hard to get to it, it's one of those things
you don't just call up on your instant-teller bank card.  A second
mortgage on the house, the same thing.  Who has $100,000, $200,000 lying
around?  And who, even if he's lucky enough to get it within sight, can
produce it in cash?

Who's ever paid much attention to bail?  I know the signs for bondsmen
sprout like dandelions on the streets around every big city courthouse,
the way monument carvers bunch up on the road to the cemetery.  Makes
sense.  But that's where my familiarity ends.  And so, I suspect, does
yours.  Even if we called her parents, they wouldn't have it at home in
a sock.  I guess they'd call their broker and tell him to sell
something.  A couple of things.

"What do they expect of us, Wendell?" I asked him this angrily.

"Bailwise, you mean?"

"Bailwise." Jesus.

"It's hard to answer that, buddy," Wendell had said.  "Depending on the
evidence, the prosecution might, probably would, allege that it was a
capital crime, in which case we could just about kiss bail goodbye.
Capital crimes involve robberies, rape.  Kidnapping.  Killing a cop." It
was hard to say those words to us, I think, but he did, though he
swaddled them as much as he could.  "I wouldn't be surprised if they
thought kidnapping was a distinct possibility here.  It wouldn't be
unexpected."

Nothing is real, I told myself.  And nothing lasts.

"And if by some miracle," Carolyn began, "it's not a capital crime?

If it's just-what's the opposite?-just a garden-variety crime?  What?

Vanilla?"

"Not so fast there.  Before the bond, first there's the matter of his
status." By which he meant, were we going to opt to have him tried as a
juvenile (which he was) or an adult (which, if we chose wrong, he just
might conceivably not ever get to be)?  "Small chance, small chance,"
Wendell told us there in the Rapaports' gorgeous living room.

"None really.  They would never execute.  No way.  Not this boy."

The word was a black hole: our lives, both, all of them, collapsed
inward, imploded, disappeared at the sound of it.  Somehow I hadn't
expected him to say it.  Execute?  Taste would prohibit saying it, or
concern for our feelings.  It was like the worst diagnosis Carolyn could
make of a patient's chances, and I knew she'd only deliver it to parents
she judged could deal with it.  Why did Wendell think we could deal so
casually with execute?  He didn't care, was the truth, of course; we had
to deal with it whether we could or not.  As, eventually, did the
parents of dying children.  I was embarrassed at my own naivete.  I had
not passed yet into some stage, I saw, in which I accepted that the
wheels of this court, this system, were going to roll on whatever we
understood, Carolyn and me, or liked to pretend we could control.

I recovered first.  "Why do you say no way?" I, at least, didn't have to
say the word.

"First off, you're in New Hampshire, Ben.  This isn't Texas, one of
those wild and crazy Southern states that love to pull the lever.  Or
injection, actually, it's not electric anymore."

"Thanks," we both said.  A comforting distinction.

"And class.  Let's be honest here.  Look at him." By which he meant, I
suppose, too clean, too white, too middle class, too- "All the things
you are," Wendell said, a song, a bloody love song, I thought without
gratitude.  You are the precious touch of springtime.  What kind of
correlations could you make, then-no one was executed in the last
calendar year whose parents have butcher-block kitchen counters?  Who
eat sun-dried tomatoes and fresh pasta in cream sauce?  Who listen to
Bach on good equipment?  I'd always understood that, of course; everyone
understood it.

Carolyn said, "That's terrible, you know."

"Yeah, it is.  Sure it is." He shouldn't comb his hair down like that,
like an aging Beatle or a Down syndrome boy with too high a forehead.

I wished I could tell him.  He looked saddened.  "It is terrible for the
folks at the other end, and it's probably a good argument against the
death penalty, but this isn't the time to waste any energy bleeding for
them, to be perfectly frank.  You've got enough to deal with."

"All the things we are, Car," I said to her.  "If only we could bottle
it and sell it.  Buy the right wines and keep your kids safe from
execution!  Assure your little felons their future as short-termers!" We
joined hands.  I raised her knuckles to my lips and kissed them and
closed my eyes.

Hey, Mom and Dad, how's tricks on Hilton Head?  You got your fifteen
minutes of winter yet?  That pretty, pretty land.  Anyone flushed a
toilet down there lately?  Anyone dropped a candy-bar wrapper on the
grass and gone to jail for it?

Funny I should mention jail.  Let's see, that reminds me.  Remember your
grandson, Jacob?  Our oldest, right, and older than you know.

Well, see-I say-what ifHow much do you love him?  Let me ask you that,
first off.  Or us, Carolyn and me, how much do you love us, that's what
it comes down to if you strip it clean.  How thick is blood compared to
water?  And another generation down, is it still pretty viscous, do you
think?  Holding firm, the color recognizable, your own?

Because we had a nice boy here, he"Good God," she said to me.  "You're
not in any condition to call my parents.  Ben, for pity's sake." She
took the telephone gently from my hand.  We were in the still,
indirectly lit reaches of the Rapaports' kitchen, where the white
telephone hung surrounded by an assortment of note-taking paraphernalia
that was no help to Azula.  All the pads had departmental insignias on
them; doodling, you had your choice of Wellesley or Harvard.  Michael
and Sarah were at work.  Azula was in charge, in her fashion; she had
cleared the counters of breakfast plates and crumbs, stacked the
dishwasher, tidied the morning newspapers behind which the family had
taken its coffee and orange juice.

"This is not a sociable time for us," Sarah told us apologetically,
knowing how relieved we'd all be.

We had managed, so far, to tell very little to Carolyn's parents.  This
had entailed wholesale lying of a kind she'd never before indulged in,
and though she hardly confided everything in them-when had she stopped?
she asked me as if I knew.  Twelve?  Sixteen?  It was actually something
she ought to think about, she said, and try to remember.

(I never did confide in mine, so I had no yardstick to extend to her.)
It was a strain, the magnitude of oversight her ordinary tone had
represented for three weeks now.  They were her parents and they didn't
need to know; she hadn't wanted to panic them.  Jacob has run away,
she'd told them.  We don't know where he is, but we've heard from him by
postcard, we know he's okay .  .  .  No lies there, right?

Only omissions necessary for everyone's peace of mind.

But being able to get away with it, not being accountable-I could see
how it was another loss for her.  Meanwhile, she prayed no national
newspaper would seize on the case, or one of those Murder-of-theWeek
television programs.  The chances that they were reading the back pages
of The New York Times these days were slim.  (The Boston papers were
wild with it: MURDER SUSPECT NETTED IN CAMBRIDGE DRUG BUST.  True, they
admitted he was not implicated in the drug bust; true, he wasn't exactly
a slavering butcher with a knife in his hand.

But headline writers don't write for the reassurance of grandparents.)
We said, Well, so many boys light out for the territories.  You know.

So many come home.  Protecting them, we felt like we were protecting our
children.  Mostly Bea and Ira seemed to be playing bridge and tending
their perennials these days.  They were taking a class in Bulbs and
Tubers and another called New Varieties of Religious Experience, taught
by a Presbyterian who played the guitar.  I called it their WASP
Afterlife.

The issue was a lot simpler for me because my mother, in the Hebrew Home
for the Aged, had given no signs of understanding a human sentence,
simple or complex, for many years.  She had become for me-I've finally
killed the pain and learned to allow myself to think it-a geological
phenomenon whose stunned state reminded me more of a natural outcropping
or a calcified extrusion, a barnacle perhaps, than of the woman I had,
with whatever misgivings, loved.  She was a set of memories I cherished,
but the woman I visited, poor hairless toothless wordless thing, had no
relation to those.  I had wished I could go to my father's grave and
talk to him there, ask for advice, emotional only, to put to use the
late-dawning respect and sympathy I had developed in his last years. But
that was a luxury: before I could commune about ultimate responses I had
to-the phrase had not stopped making me cringe-find bail, fast, an
impossible amount of It.

There are all kinds of impenetrable bond arrangements out there that
made me sick to my stomach to try to understand-Carolyn does the taxes.
Ten percent of $100,000 (not that we had it).  I thought about the
future and I quailed.  You don't use one of those guys out on the
street, I had learned, if you're not desperate.  If you're not and you
do, they'll introduce you to the desperation you've been missing.

You could give them ten, twenty thousand just for the loan of their
money.  You could worry, too, about getting your legs broken if your boy
skipped to St.  Iouis again, or Santa Fe.  It seemed like a bad deal.

"I'll do it, Benny.  Let me.  I can handle them." She was all pale and
beige today, head to foot, as if she were in a state of semi-erasure.

I didn't argue.  I went into the dining room, where I could half hear
her half of the conversation in the silent house, and sat down.  The
empty kimono hung on the wall, flat as a cast-off skin.  Random phrases
broke over me: "could be a person but.  .  .  the evidence will.  .  .
and the lawyer .  .  .  not reason to .  .  .  all right." Her voice was
horribly steady, unrecognizably controlled.  She was holding on for all
of us.

Jacob would have been proud.

She is the Good Daughter, that's the thing.  She has a younger sister,
Nina, who had put them through so much that Carolyn, not inclined to be
difficult in the first place, had been cast, irrevocably, as the one who
does no wrong, and they expected her to live up to it.  And she was
giving up the title.  One child, I've long since realized, has to be the
one to give pain, the other to spare it, soothe, smooth it over, never
offend.  Household economy; the Grimm Brothers understood it.  (So now
Judith could be stuck with that-it was probably bound to be her lot
anyhow, if that was any consolation.) To complicate matters, they were
not actually her parents.  I mean that only biologically.  Water's been
turned to blood there, though, in a kind of alchemy they've worked hard
at.  They were given the gift of her at a week and a half, after they
had despaired of having their own natural child; and in a little more
than a year, to the accompaniment of the laughter of the gods, Bea was
pregnant with Nina.  (They say that's not as common, statistically, as
it seems to be.  Maybe it's just such a stunning coincidence that every
instance you hear about seems to count double?) Somehow they never
seemed defensive about the adoption, so that Carolyn, during the phase
in which she maundered around dreaming of her "real" (thus superior)
parents, never had to feel guilty or secretive.  And the curiosity
passed-it had been a "prIvate" adoption; she was told by the doctor, who
was a friend of Bea and Ira's, who "took care of it," that her parents
were young, healthy, he a pharmacy student, she a nurse-how wonderful,
she thought when she decided to become a doctor: fulfilling the family
pattern, maybe even its genetic heritage!

But her own parents were good enough for her.  In the end, the
sufficiency of their affection-its daily sufficiency-seemed to satisfy
her more than it did Nina, who, I've always been convinced, never
forgave the interloper-not even related by blood!  -for getting there
first.  Getting where?  Into her parents' concentration, their
affections?

Surely they loved Nina at least as well.  If lovingkindness is a
mystery, I swear so is unassuageable anger, the refusal to be happy.

Nina's a marvelous woman, by the way, from certain angles, the easy
ones: she's the kids' favorite, for all the reasons she's hard for us to
get along with-she's unpredictable (unreliable), openhanded (careless),
she sends them crazy gifts from wherever she lights down in her quest
for "authenticity"-they have a set of shrunken heads, a box of mother I
fpearl dominoes, a gold-plated lute-none of which she can afford, though
she doesn't scruple to ask her parents for money.  She never shows the
teeth of her anger and disappointment to the children, the sense that
she's been fundamentally cheated and the world owes her reparations. But
Carolyn gets silence and defensive accusations.  I tell her she's lazy,
I tell her she's never worked as hard as Carolyn works in a single
day-you can imagine how popular I am with her -and she tells me I'm
prejudiced.  Well, of course I am; it's Carolyn I love.  She makes me
feel like a Republican bridge player, all selfrighteous condemnation,
rigid goal-setting.  (For that, I've always wanted to say, the pure
thing, you should meet my brother, Stuie.

Who's actually a terrific, generous, warmhearted guy in his plodding
way-he's a CPA, successful enough for a place with a cathedral ceiling
and a pool, "a small one, a junior," he told me in an attempt, I
thought, and I found it poignant, not to touch off envy in his older
brother.

His way isn't mine, but we manage to recognize the boundaries and keep
away from the dangerous spots.  Also he lives in San Jose, just far
enough so that it doesn't matter that much what kind of music he plays,
what kind of house I live in.  Mostly we have to come to terms over our
mother; mostly there isn't much left to come to terms with.

I haven't told him about Jacob because we don't speak more than maybe
four times a year and it would be strange if I called up to inform him.

Funny, that.  It would matter to hirn, and yet to announce it out of the
sheer blue spaces of our distance would seem almost-I don't know, almost
a form of boasting: look what I'm into now, my ordinary brother.  High
crimes and misdemeanors.  Not even junior-sized.) I loved Carolyn's
parents because they were steady and unflappable.

My mother was wildly superstitious, everything she did and believed
seemed tinged with the smell of the Old Country: she called my in laws
Yankees.  That amused the hell out of them, because, after all, they
were only one generation more "American." My father's considerable
wisdom was all about the arduousness of being a Jew and an immigrant-the
difficulty of a decency prompted by faith.  He had been schooled in
religious matters in Kiev, but here he was in "clucks and suits," a
cutter with a sharp eye and a sharp knife who only came to life on the
Sabbath.  Whereas Ira Miller, Carolyn's father (a Dad, where Herschl
Reiser was a Papa), was a perfume and cologne importer, more successful
than such things ought to make you, value for value.  He gave away a
handsome bit of it to charity but, though he disdained ostentation, he
also gave his daughters lovely wardrobes and expensive educations.

And Bea.  She had champagne hair when I first met her and it has stayed
exactly as it was, not a single bubble of a curl gone flat in all these
years.  She's a lot sadder than she was years ago, what with all Nina's
miseries, the abuse of substances her parents had never even heard of,
but pea is still openhearted to us, and perfect to the children.

Possibly she smiles too much, like the President's wife, and attempts to
gloss over the bad patches unconvincingly, but that's always seemed more
brave to me than blind.  The only thing wrong with the two of them, we'd
decided, is that they had gratefully retired to this stage set by the
sea, where they were indisputably happy: they'd bought the illusion,
there, of the perfectable landscape that is all wealthy, white, and
golf-addicted.  It is not political, Ira has said.  The right to be safe
and comfortable is nobody's business but our own.  Ah, well.

Carolyn told me I shouldn't be so damn superior about it-happy parents,
she says, are nothing to look in the mouth-and of course she's right.

But now I found myself wondering, pressing the heels of my hands to my
eyes that were as exhausted as if I'd been driving cross-country in bad
light.  Now whom would they blame for this little bombshell?

I the deviant one, the immigrant's boy, the one with the bristly beard
who stole their blond daughter?  Or some kind of wayward gene in
Carolyn's background that no one had had to account for, or ever could?
Would they turn on me and admit to suspicions they've kept on the leash
all these years, I the nonprofit one, the tumultuous, argumentative one
with the New York accent and the leftist politics who seemed to enjoy
making them squirm over every choice they made?  Would they exempt their
Golden Girl, their Good Witch of the East, from responsibility?

Oh stop, I thought.  Oh stop, oh stop.  How do I manage to intrude
myself on everything?  She was talking to her parents who were loving if
genteel, forgiving if abused.  Why the hell did I have to think about
their regard of me?  And why did I have to suspect it?  I pictured them
in their long, low sunny house in its clump of carefully spared trees on
the old South Carolina plantation that had become a haven for retired
couples of Unimpeachable Taste and Unimaginable Means.

They were trying to understand what their daughter was telling them
about why she needed to hand over an extraordinary sum just to promise
that Jacob would not skip out of our line of vision again.

Their grandson had not, last time they'd seen him, had a bizarre hairdo
in a primary color, he did not cut school or, as far as they knew (but
that was fast disappearing as a criterion), deal drugs like others'
unwise, unlucky grandsons.  (Their neighbors the Pursleys had a boy,
once their best A- I adorable grandson, in jail for crack, using it or
selling it they could never remember, but it probably didn't make much
difference.  For this the grandparents now had to suffer the word poor
before their names as reliably as a prefix.) My in-laws were on both
extensions of the phone, separated from each other by many Oriental hall
runners.  Carolyn's father would be stock-still in the mauve Queen Anne
chair in the corner of the living room near the long windows.  Three
kinds of birds would be playing hopscotch on the other side of the glass
where he dutifully put out seed and her mother wondered if he was
spoiling them.  He would call out to his wife, if not yet, then soon,
"Bea, my nitro, can you bring me my nitro, please?  I'm afraid to go get
it myself."

Carolyn, her cheeks bright pink as if she'd been hit, sweat at her
hairline, would be clutching and unclutching the fist that wasn't
holding the phone, pleading silently, "Daddy, don't die, don't die of
this!"

Out loud she said in a calm, pinched voice, "Listen, Ben has won a
grant, yes, isn't that nice?  From the government, yes, for his work."

She didn't say fin ally .  "But we don't get that money for a few
months, that's the problem, or we wouldn't have t I yes, well, I hate to
have to ask, since we will have it, or some of it, I mean, it's just
inconve niently timed." Also, inconveniently, a good deal less than this
was going to cost us.  Why hadn't Jacob thought of that, I wondered. Why
couldn't he have waited like a thoughtful boy until my check came from
Uncle Sam-God, my mind in its desperation was a disgusting thing!  It
was as if it housed a worm that crawled away from me into the most
bizarre places.  I came in and put my hands on Carolyn's shoulders;
surprised, she jumped under my touch.  Oh Christ, Ira, I thought, laying
my cheek on her hair, which smelled vaguely of raspberries, don't you
die, too.  I could hear her mother's tiny faraway voice pleading with
her that it not be true, it not be true.  They make mistakes, darling,
she was insisting.  The police are notorious for needing suspects!
Except that he-seems to have run off-do you have any reason to think he
did this thing?

Azula came down the stairs carrying a full yellow plastic basket of
dirty wash.  She stopped, bowed a little, like an Oriental woman, with
her eyes fixed on us as she had probably been instructed.  She hefted
the basket to her hip and headed for the basement stairs.  "Chov a nice
day!" she said enthusiastically, with a terrific Hebrew guttural,
showing her very white teeth.  She had probably been practicing as she
approached, saying it over and over until it sounded like a single word.

Her glossy black hair hung in braids over her shoulders, straight and
slender as asparagus spears.

We stared at her.  Carolyn put her hand over the receiver as if she were
going to say something, then smiled earnestly, nodding.

"You too," I said, showing my teeth back.  "Have a good one."

Wendell rang the bell and through the narrow margins of glass beside the
door I could see how patiently he stood on the front step waiting to be
admitted.  Probably, I thought, your best lawyer would be pacing around
out there all bound-up energy, puma-like.  We had wondered if we were
going to get a small-town defense out of him.  Was Michael right, should
we go for the best available heavyweight?  He had offered to buy us one.
We had, for the moment at least, declined.  Because, of course, Wendell
was not going to be our defender, he didn't want to take on a case as
heavy as this, nor (though he didn't say so) would he so alienate his
neighbors.  Bad enough he was advising us now.  He might help out, if it
came to that, but even he insisted we needed a defense from outside, an
experienced hardball player.  Has anyone noticed what it
costs-disgusting how money kept intruding$100,000 maybe, right out in
front, probably double, depending-to be defended?  Has anyone noticed
that it's a specialty that takes manic devotion, specific experience,
and a clear desk, and lawyers like Wendell Bye have one out of three if
we're lucky?

No, I had never noticed.  I had not had occasion to interest myself in
the subject.  There's a state team, a homicide defense squad or
something, he had told us reassuringly.  It sounded like a club the
neighborhood kids had made up.  "If you can't go out and hire yourself a
big name, they pretty much give you somebody who only does this.

It's like a defense pool, it's service.  Vastly underpaid.  It keeps the
game at least a little even." He smiled wanly.

"Underpaid."

"Well, compared to the Louis Nizers and the Melvin Bellis.  A little."

Even when he wasn't working, Wendell wore a tie, not the offhand kitschy
kind I've got, flamingos or heavenly babies in raucous colors, but
something striped and collegiate.  (Stephanie, I realized, though I'd
never thought about it before, wore stockings, too, on every occasion
but a picnic.)  Their rectitude was bizarre and, I thought, terrifying.

He came in gravely and looked around.  "These folks have a little
something stashed away, I guess," he ventured.

That wouldn't have been the first thing I'd have noticed.  He stood
staring at the high-colored warriors' shields over the mantel; he seemed
to be considering a witticism but apparently thought better of it.  Just
as well; if it didn't have to do with the Seven Samurai, I didn't want
to hear it.

Carolyn came in from the kitchen and gave him a desultory peck on the
cheek.  "You've seen him?"

Wendell Bye tends to have the look of a man whose glasses have fogged up
suddenly.  He stood now blinking very solemnly behind them.  "I've seen
him, yes." He sat down on one of the white end chairs and balanced his
attache case on his knees.  But when it was open he stared into it for a
minute and then, as if he didn't much like what he saw in there, slowly
closed it again.  "You could say I've seen him, but I haven't heard
him." He laughed.  "Hey, that's the definition of a perfect child, isn't
it?"

Oh Christ.  I was on my feet shouting.  Carolyn tried to quiet me by
raising her hands and patting the air.  "Some perfect child!  We warned
him, Wendell, we told him you were coming and he'd better not waste your
time."

"I'm sorry," Carolyn said to him quietly.  "I really am, Wendell.

Did he just-sit there?"

Wendell sighed.  "He didn't look angry.  You know what he's like.

We get exercised and he manages to stay as calm and detached as the
Buddha."

I couldn't stop walking around the room, I suppose it was the energy I'd
have used to wallop Jacob if he'd tried a performance like that in my
presence.  (Nonsense, I knew I hadn't been able to do anything with him
when we visited.  But that was in public.  That was a jail, for God's
sake.)  "Does he really think he can keep up this way?" I wanted to
know.  "If he ignores us, we'll just go away?  Wendell, does he know
what he's up against, do you think?  That this isn't a little game?"

Wendell shrugged.  "I'm no psychologist, Ben.  I don't know what he
thinks he's doing.  I told him, I think pretty accurately, what our
alternatives are."He took his glasses off and rubbed the little red
ditches on the sides of his nose; he looked as Yelieved as someone who'd
removed his shoes.  "But I can't tell you what he heard because he
didn't ask me anything, he didn't make me repeat anything or clarify it
or any of the kind of things people do a lot of when they're with
lawyers.

You know."

When it came to the need for clarification, yes, I sure as hell did
know.

"I tried to reassure him that he might have plenty to say in his own
defense, that depending on what he has to tell, there might possibly be
no case at all." He looked at me with a hopeless grin.  "If that
impressed him, he wasn't saying."

I flared at him.  "Is that true?  What do you mean?"

Wendell looked at me with the opposite of compassion.  I think he knew,
or at least suspected, that, though I liked him well enough, I was not
particularly impressed with his intelligence; he felt vaguely
patronized, and that was true enough, I gness.  Because the law uses
words, I've always made the haphazard and quite incorrect assumption
that the people who practice it value literacy, and might even go so far
as to read a little.  Not so.  Wendell and Stephanie have the largest TV
screen I've seen in a private house, and they have a hot tub, a very
good car and a fully equipped van.  But if there are any books in their
house they're catalogues of creature comforts just waiting to be
purchased.  I think they've actually invested in a series of classics
with gold-tooled covers, but those are never intended 'for reading,
after all.

They're to fill the random shelf or two with something tasteful.

When he talks about law, though, he loves to use phrases like "terms of
art" which basically means "Do me a favor and lay off, Ben.  This is my
bailiwick." As someone who has her own private vocabulary, Carolyn is
sympathetic.  Apparently she recognizes a fellow craftsman.

I was being cruel, as far as she was concerned; this was a bit of
unbecoming contemptuousness, the snobbery of an artist just as narrowly
invested in his own jargon but who has to maintain the myth of his
absolute openness.  She insisted that Wendell loved his profession, and
those moments of swelling pride that I found toad-like and defensive she
was pleased to understand.  He had a job to do and he did it well.  What
he read or didn't read after-hours was his own business: Do you ask your
doctor what he reads?  I couldn't argue.

And why he was our friend was something I could worry about another
time.

"Listen, Ben," he said slowly and clearly.  Whatever was going to
happen, he must have felt good about this role reversal, anyway.  "I
told Jacob they've got a couple of eyewitnesses, you know that, and I
suppose they do.  But it's not clear exactly what they saw, and at worst
that's circumstantial, anyway.  They aren't saying-at least they haven't
said-they've got somebody who saw the murder.  Or saw him dumping-no,
pardon me, let me rephrase that-saw the body being dumped.  The other
forensic stuff-we'll have to see.  They might have the softest case in
the world, for all we know."

He seemed to be pleading with me; these must have been the words he used
with my son that had got him nowhere.  His earnestness was endearing,
and it would go over well in a courtroom, where he looked like
everyone's good scout.  But I understood, watching and listening to him,
in his blue rep tie with the little red and gold crowns on it, and his
trustworthy square shoulder pads vaguely reminiscent of highschool
football gear, his reasonable voice, how Jacob saw only an assistant
principal or one of those short-sleeved Mormons who come to the door
with free literature about salvation.  He would never volunteer a word
to such a man.  (If I wanted to argue that I was more his kind of man in
my sloppy shirt, with my less than regular demeanor, I'm also his father
and there could be no bigger disqualification than that.)  Maybe style
plays too large a part in teenage life, but we're not about to change
that.  At least not in time.

"If he'd talk we might be able to establish some alternatives.  Where he
was, whether they split up along the way-"

"Wendell," Carolyn said.  She was being very circumspect, looking at him
hard, narrowing her eyes.  "Are you talking about what you believe or
what you think we can establish?"

He licked his lips quickly, which signaled that he was about to give a
little lecture.  I think she had asked something very naive.  "Carolyn,
what do you think the law is." He didn't wait for an answer.  "Isn't it
just a matter of who can establish what most effectively?  By which I
mean most convincingly."

"What-" S.he seemed to dig around with her toe.  Then she sighed and
began again.  "What about the truth of what happened?  Don't you ever
ask?"

He looked at her, that navy rep look of his, for a long time.  Behind
his eyes I could see little warning flares going off: No, no, don't
complicate things this way!  In that split second he understood that we
knew things it would make him unhappy to hear.  He would probably get
over his unhappiness, he's good at that, but would that knowledge hamper
the vigor of his defense?  This moment must change hands all the time, I
thought, between client and lawyer.  What a business, to devote yourself
to such expediency.  To build the house of your work on evasion,
illusion, intimidation, all for hire to strangers.  He will have to ask
us now, will have to know what we know, for fear it can be used against
us.

Wendell drew away from us an inch or two.  "The truth," he said, not
just to Carolyn, "sometimes enters in.  You can't always expect to keep
it out.  But the truth isn't always simple, Carolyn.  And it's up to the
prosecution to prove what they can prove.  If they can't, well"and he
looked all around as if we were a whole roomful of listeners"then
they've failed in their mandate.  It's a fair fight." I thought he was
too simple a man to really relish perverting the truth, playing the
angles.  No wonder he was not the lawyer for us, who would need to.

It was too ridiculous.  She couldn't believe they did it literally:
Wendell told them the Massachusetts "authorities" would escort Jacob to
the state line and hand him-like a piece of goods, a package or a sheaf
of stapled papers!  -to the New Hampshire "authorities." He had some
trouble understanding why the prospect caused his clients such bitter
amusement.  They laughed and laughed, until he saw the tears of rage in
Carolyn's eyes.

"Can we watch?" she asked, and wiped them away angrily with the back of
her hand.  "Can we see the great habeas-corpus exchange?"

He hesitated.  Really, they made things hard for themselves.

"I mean, that wouldn't be illegal, would it?  We could just ride behind
the police car-at a decent distance-and when they stop there"

"At the barbed wire on the frontier-" Ben added eagerly.

"We'll just get out-we wouldn't crowd them or anything, they don't even
have to know we're there!  And we'll just watch."

"Right." Ben again.  "We wouldn't dream of saying anything, or
interfering.  We'd just see him in the act of being extradited.  I've
always wanted to see an act of extradition, what it looks like, how-"

"Okay," Wendell said, maybe a little too harshly.  "All right, I hear
you." One of Steph's phrases.  "I truthfully don't know if you can do
that or not, I never knew anybody who wanted to."

Carolyn was seething-some of Ben's anger seemed to be spreading through
her like a stain.  "I can't imagine why not.  It's not every day you get
to see your kid get-what's the word?-manumitted?  Or was that just for
slaves?  I don't remember, but it sounds like 'handed over.

"Carolyn," Wendell said.

"Remanded.  That's it, remanded.  It had 'man' in it, I knew that was
the thing.  From 'hand,' though, certainly not from 'man,' don't you
think?" She looked momentarily satisfied.

He reached out his own hand to touch her arm but pulled it back at the
last minute; it didn't seem a terribly good idea.  "Wouldn't it just be
easier if you went on home and then met us in court?  I'd let you know
as soon as the arraignment's set.  There just isn't any need-" Reason
not the need, kept going through her head.  Oh, reason not the need, but
let the deed be done.  Shakespeare, was it?  Lear, maybe.

What was all this archaic business cluttering up her head, the
manumission of slaves, the well-turned Elizabethan sentence?  At this
rate she'd start beginning her sentences with "Whereas .  .  ." Is this
what happened when you got involved with the formal system of the law
and all their stiff and fancy language?

"We'll be there," she told him firmly.  She was trying to imagine
whether the police car would screech to a halt right beside the little
black-and-white vertical marker between the states, or else a little
farther on, the big blue-and-gold sign that said BIENVENUE A NEW
HAMPSHIRE-wELcoME T0 NEW HAMPSHIRE, while the traffic roared past on
Route 3.  The shoulder was full of pocked and crusted snow these days,
sealed with ice that kept melting and refreezing.  TW0 HIT BY CAR DURING
PRI50NER RETURN.  H0RRIFIED PARENTS WATCH, HELPLESS.  Or would they pull
off and drive into the safety of some gas station or Dunkin' Donuts near
the highway, give him over (in handcuffs?) and go in and have a cup of
something hot and a frosted donut while Jacob sat locked in the car
looking out, his mouth watering?  "We'll be there," she said again
firmly to Wendell, who looked faintly disgusted.  "Nobody has to
understand this but us.

Wendell was wrong.  New Hampshire sent a sheriff down, sparing a cruiser
for a few hours, and he took Jacob away before they even got to the
jail.  Abducted by the law.

When they inquired at the desk about the transfer, the clerk with the
mustache looked at them from behind the glass and said coolly, "Don't
get angry at me, sir.  Tell your lawyer he's out of date.  We used to do
that, but not anymore.

Ben was prepared to object.

"Truth is," said the Cop, shaking his head in what must have been
admiration, "those sheriffs like to get away for a couple hours, you
know?  It's a nice drive, like half a day off..  ." He winked.
"Taxpayers' expense.

Walking into the Town House wasn't easy, nor was crossing, as casually
as possible, the creaky wooden floor to the courtroom.  She smiled and
nodded to the half-dozen people she saw, whether she knew them or
not-the town clerk, whose heels clicked importantly, sharp little
hammers (she would be on the phone in her office as soon as she could
get there, to spread the word of Jacob's arrival), a few men in work
clothes who were renovating the ground-floor bathroom, an assortment of
anonymous others going about their business.  Everyone knew why they
were there.

And they were here, she conceded, hardly a moment too soon.

Celene had information, courtesy of a chain of gossips the length of a
city block, that if Jacob hadn't been found and returned to Hyland, the
Taverners were planning on leading a vigil, and soon-candles, black
ribbons-to protest the inefficiency or indifference of the police.

Jacob's picture mounted on their picket signs like a head on a pike?

Martha's beside his?  Could anyone have watched such a thing and not
thought about a lynching?

And now, how many people had seen Jacob being unloaded from the county
sheriff's car, his hands helpless in their cuffs, his face and the
sheriff's wholly impassive, looking neither way?  What did they mean
when they talked about secrecy for juveniles?  Oh, to have done this in
the dark!  Celene had offered to come, to be with them; school was over
for the day (which only increased the number of curious observers in
front of the Town House).  "It's okay," Carolyn had told her.  "I'm
filing away every nice suggestion like that, though.  I'm making a list
for the heavenly accountant, and I promise I'll make sure he sees it."
As long as no one else could live it for her, there didn't seem to be
any reason to involve another soul.  She wished she could thank her
friends more convincingly, but the gap between them loomed deep and
dangerous and could not be acknowledged.  It was as if a lake that had
an invisible floor had sprung up between her house and the houses of her
friends, yet every day they came outside and walked across it toward her
as casually as if it were a field of milkweed and yarrow and blowing
grasses.  They seemed to get across; she lived at the bottom, where
there was no air, no light.

When she and Ben came in through the heavy swinging courtroom door,
Jacob turned and looked at them.  Something in his gaze, Carolyn thought
instantly, was a little different from that jail-house stare.  It seemed
more-permeable.  Penetrable.  He seemed to recognize them.

But it was unnatural to keep coming upon him in these alien places-after
his disappearance, it was the next profound disconnection.  A weaning,
she thought.  What an irony, for a mother to be weaned, as suddenly as
those who fling a child off the breast violently, without remorse.  One
morning he is your son, and then he's a boy you keep encountering
distantly in public rooms; whenever you see him now he's lit harshly by
fluorescence, and his custodians hover barely out of sight.  He was back
in familiar clothing at least, his blueand-green striped sweater, his
worn jeans with one fashionably torn and flapping knee.  He was seated
in the first row of benches, alone.

Wendell stood to the side of the judge's bench talking to Tom Grady, the
judge, who was holding his robe in his hands casually, as if it were his
raincoat.  Wendell put up his hand when he saw them, as if to say, Hang
on there, don't go!

Ben went ahead of her, straight to Jacob.  He sat down beside him,
touched his arm, and then-Carolyn was astonished-put his head roughly,
affectionately, on his son's shoulder.  He was beyond reunion: skip the
welcoming embrace.  It was as if he was saying, There, then.

That's over.  Thank God.  It was like a deep, half-laughing sigh of
relief.

Joking, almost: simply a meeting after too long a separation.  "I'm
going on the theory that he's terrified," Ben had said at breakfast.
"I'm giving him the benefit of the doubt-I think he's frozen with fear."
Maybe, she thought.  "And maybe if I act on that I'll get some results."
Jacob didn't turn to him now to reciprocate, but he didn't throw him off
either.

Carolyn approached slowly.  She was aware of a huge anger that had
replaced her relief at seeing him alive in that jail, closed into that
safe behind the bright red door.  She didn't like game playing except in
its time-game time-and, frightened or not, he was manipulating them,
even now.  "Jacob," she said.  (How could you lean against someone who
didn't want to lean against you?) Jacob looked at her as if it were an
ordinary day and she had found him in the little grandstand at the ball
field.  What is the matter with you?  she was desperate to ask him, and
mean it literally.  Have you taken leave of your senses?  Are you
psychotic?  Her heart pounded so hard it nearly knocked her off-balance.
But how could anyone answer such a question usefully?  What were those
syllogisms-All men lie.  I am a man.  I lie.  Why dishonor your own
sanity by asking?

Tom Grady had ducked out long enough to squirm into his batwinged black
robe, which looked strangely dramatic in the deserted courtroom.  He was
followed by Della Fort, the court clerk, a woman of such anonymous
figure and feature that Carolyn thought it a wonder that she could
summon up her name at all.  Della had owned the house, years ago, that
was rented to Judith's day-care center; So were acquaintanceships
layered in Hyland-everyone played at least two roles, usually more, in
the dramas of each other's lives.  She also had a daughter who'd had
scoliosis, whom Carolyn had helped.  She baked phenomenal prize-winning
cakes, decorated in blue and purple, with silver shot like mercury
embedded in them, and dustings of rainbow sugar and other
inedible-looking designs that suggested a wild, suppressed imagination.
She came to the door doggedly, year after year, to collect for the
Cancer Society.  She looked stern and met no ones eye in the
courtroom-apparently that came with her job.  But Carolyn was suffused
with gratitude that she was the only outsider there besides the judge;
she seemed, suddenly, such a familiar.  I have lived some of my life
with you, Della Fort, she thought.  I have spent the last eleven years
right here under the same weather, Seeing the same hills.

Surely that ought to buy us a little sympathy?

Tom Grady was a lawyer who served as district court judge a couple of
days a week, hearing drunk I riving and petty-theft charges, mostly.

Today, for this special hearing, he had simply walked down the hill from
his office toward the Town House, instead of up toward his neat
Victorian clapboard, where his wife was waiting supper.  He was a heavy,
hard-sweating red-blond man who looked as if he might drive an
eighteen-wheeler.  (In fact, from what Carolyn knew of him, for all he
suggested a sixteenth-century executioner, he was a man of fairly
delicate sensibilities.) He gestured to Jacob to come forward to sit at
one of the tables closer to his bench.

"May we come, too, sir?" Ben asked in a tone so respectful, or
terrified, it nearly made Carolyn smile.

"If you like, Mr.  Reiser.  But that's usually reserved for counsel."

The judge had a husky consoling voice; he sounded like Mel Torm I .

All of them got up and moved.  Ben sat to Jacob's left, but Carolyn
moved one chair over on his right, so that Wendell could be beside him.
She thought of all the movies she'd seen-where else do you ever get to
observe courtrooms?-and the newspaper sketches, in which the head of the
accused is inclined in the direction of his lawyer, who's giving
directions.  Jacob's head did not incline.  It looked alert and
independent and even, perhaps, relaxed.  When Wendell wanted to say
something to him, he was the one who leaned over to speak quietly in
Jacob's ear, which did not so much as twitch.  Jacob's hair was slightly
shaggy over his collar line, but not extremely so.  He'd been wearing
that blue-and-green sweater for a long time now.  The boy was about to
be placed under a murder indictment, and his mother, otherwise blank,
was faintly amused to recognize that she was worrying about clean
underwear.

Fran Conklin had entered silently, alone.  This was not going to be a
public circus-she was getting to be grateful for small favors.  He sat
down at the other table.  His uniform was cumbersome, the hardware on
his belt clacked against his chair and his gun in its holster was pushed
up at such an awkward angle that it looked ready to tumble out onto the
floor.  It looked dangerous.  MURDER SUSPECT 5H0T AT ARRAIGNMENT BY
P0LICE CHIEF 5 REVoLVER.  Carolyn could hardly get herself to look at
Fran.  She was surprised at the resentment she harbored toward him-it
was illogical and she didn't like to indulge illogic, it was undignified
and counterproductive.  Ben leaned forward anx iously, clasping and
unclasping his hands.  She sat perfectly still, forcing herself to
breathe regularly, the way she did when she couldn't sleep, to even out
her heartbeat.  If they reacted this way to the arraignment, which was
nothing-pro forma, more or less, the judge a known quantity, close to
home-how were they going to act during the trial?

The judge's voice ground into use as if it was a rusty thing that needed
to be practiced in the open air.  He begged their indulgence for having,
at this irregular hour, to dispense with certain formal rituals-he could
declare court in session himself, and no one nced stand at his approach.
This was a special session but it was genuine and binding in the sight
of the state and the nation whose flags flanked him.  They nodded
obediently.  They seemed to be holding their breath.

Fran heaved himself up slowly to take his place to be sworn.  He moved
reluctantly, as if he were as heavy as Tom Grady.  Tom asked Fran,
Captain Conklin, what complaint he was bringing, and Fran, looking at no
one, in a monotone as if he came to report a murder a day, named the
accused, juvenile Jacob Reiser, a suspect in the homicide of one Martha
Taverner of Hyland on January 14.  He was asked if said Jacob Reiser was
present; he looked at Jacob, at all of them for the first time, without
a flicker of feeling, and said, "Yes, your honor.

That's him."

Jacob shuddered, she was sure she could feel it all along her side,
although it was Wendell she sat next to.  He quivered like a piece of
paper lifted by a light breeze.  Then he subsided.  Ben seemed to have
been poked by Fran's pointed finger, so violently did he recoil.  He put
his arm over his son's shoulder and held on.

Carolyn saw the rest of the arraignment through a scrim as red and damp
as blood.  (For reasons not apparent to her, juvenile court demanded
"true or not true," chargeable or not chargeable; guilt or non-guilt was
not suggested, as if it might be too difficult a concept for children to
comprehend.  She would ask Wendell why; he wouldn't know.)  Jacob went
forward, stood stolidly, and said in a soft, awestruck voice that did
not waver, Not true" to the accusation.

But there were other parts which Wendell took charge of, suddenly
authoritative compared to the rest of them, and thank God for that.

He was enumerating all the potent reasons Jacob should be cheaply
bailed, or, better yet, simply released in his parents' custody.  His
court voice was almost unrecognizable, except for the local flatness of
his accent, as if he and Tom didn't play golf together, play bridge,
drink beer, even, shoulder to shoulder, piss in the bushes-Wendell had
told them this in a moment of boastful pride-when they were nearing the
ninth hole, too far from the golfcourse clubhouse to hike up there in
times of need.  Wendell stood up in his gray business suit, petitioning
the court: The defendant's longtime residency in Hyland was a factor.
His parents' attachment to the community.  Their home ownership.  His
previously flawless character.  And, finally, the fact that he was still
at this moment a juvenile who could be supervised, for whom his parents
could be responsible.  (What an assumption, Carolyn thought.  Wouldn't
they be safer assuring the whereabouts of Snappy the cat?) All the other
words flew by now as they sat clenched, trying to understand:
Adjudicatory.  Adult.  Juvenile.  Certification.  And money.

Money they understood.  Money came into it publicly: could they afford a
lawyer, or would they turn to the state?  They had nearly come to blows
over this: of course her parents would buy them the best they could
find.  Of course Ben said no.  "Ben, this is Jacob."

"Thanks for reminding me." He stared into her eyes as if he thought she
was crazy.

"Ben, you're not being consistent.  I thought there was nothing you
wouldn't do-"

"Not this.  They've got plenty of respectable lawyers, Wendell said so.
Experienced at homicide.  That's all they do."

"You'll leave it to chance, to mercy?  Is this the way you'd feel about
buying a good surgeon if he needed an operation?  Or would you take him
to the charity hospital and throw him on their mercy, let any old
doctor-it's nice that they have a squad of idealistic folks doing their
pro bono obligation on the homicide patrol.  But any old stranger?"

Ben had looked at her viciously.  "Honey, they're all strangers, aren't
they?  Everybody's a stranger.  Your son's a fucking stranger, when it
comes to that."

She wasn't sure she could deal with such thoroughgoing bitterness.

She sat quiet and waited.  His face had closed over like a lake glazed
with ice, shiny and malevolent.  "Sometimes I forget you've always had
choices," he said stonily.  "Good schools, good clothes."

"Is this really the time-"

"You're right, it's not.  But I'm not having your parents hock their
goods," he said, hissing on the 5's, "so we can give it away to some
headline grabber we import in here from Hollywood."

"But what if he-she-can do a better job.  What if-"

"Carolyn, do you know what kind of money you're talking about?

A decent defense in this country shouldn't cost like that.  It shouldn't
support some goddamn pop hero and his c1osetful of terrific suits."

She'd thought those old resentments had died.  (Wouldn't the Taverners
be surprised to hear how he saw himself as the poor boy, now and
forever!  What a crazy continuum they were on, all of them.)  She
appealed to Wendell for advice; he refused to step between them.  "He
can get a good defense from the state.  He can get a good defense from a
big name, with a lot of expenses attached because the guy's got to come
in here with his whole team from who-knows-where.  Sometimes it's just
as well when people don't have a choice, if they clearly don't have the
resources." He looked uncomfortable; he focused straight ahead and would
not turn toward either of them.  "Sometimes it's not."

"Ben, separate the issues," she had pleaded finally, beside him in bed.
"Take your anger about class, take your disappointment that your kids
didn't grow up needy, take all of it and put it away till this is over.
Sort it out when we're finished.  Meanwhile-"

"Think about Jacob."

"Think about Jacob."

"Okay," he had said, and pulled the covers up to his neck, "but
understand, can you?  It's hard to keep any self-respect the way things
are going.  I don't work anymore-"

"Neither do I."

"You may not have much of a practice left right now, but, honey, you
know what you know.  It's hard stuff, solid.  It doesn't evaporate, it
doesn't-self I estruct.  I feel like my brain's being eaten out by
termites.  When I don't do it, I lose it.  So it's going fast.  And now
we turn to your parents again and ask for some of your daddy's gold."

"We can get another mortgage, Benny.  We can sell some art." She pulled
him close.  "You can do what you tell your son, darling.  Somehow or
other, you can pay your own way."

For the first time in her life Carolyn wished she had gone to law
school, to protect herself-protect them-from this helplessness, so that
she wouldn't feel this curtain of terror pulled across her eyes, through
which she seemed to see only shadows.  Ben was holding Jacob's hand;
Jacob, who looked about twelve, was letting him.

"Your honor, we will have counsel," Wendell was saying.  "We do not need
to ask the state's assistance." She made herself move into his seat,
which was still warm, and take Jacob's other hand.  It was cold and
damp, but not as rigid as her own.

"Now," said Tom Grady.  "The question of bail." The judge sat for a
moment or two in unabashed silence, communing with whatever legal and
judicial muses informed the lower court of Grieves County.

He was one of those hard-breathing men who kept a baIled-up handkerchief
at the ready and he applied it to his whole face lightly, as if for
soothing, as he spoke.  When he turned his head fast, drops flew from
him, like an actor's spit.  He even wiped his eyes like a mourner; all
of him seemed damp.

The defendant was, by law, entitled to bail.  However, the judge
reminded the court, said defendant had just been returned from an
absence from the state that had made his presence here today the result
of nothing but good fortune.  In addition to his demonstrated
unreliability, and perhaps more significant, there was the matter of a
community seriously concerned for its welfare and so anxious to bring
the perpetrator of a terrible, an unthinkable, crime to justice that for
the defendant's own safety, as well as for the reassurance of the court,
there would be no bail.  He leaned down a little to speak to them, as if
the court reporter couldn't hear him that way.  "I'm going to speak
frankly to you, Mr.  and Mrs.  Reiser.  Jacob.  I'd like this town to
cool off a little before you come back out." He waited to see if they
understood; then he put back his official demeanor.  "The matter will be
raised again after he is, or is not, certified as an adult." He looked
at Ben and Carolyn.  "I'm sorry."

Carolyn sat stunned at the impact of what he had said to themthat Jacob
was not safe here.  What did he know that he wasn't saying?

That the people out there, her neighbors, were earnest enough in their
anger to do him harm?  Vigilante justice, even in a state that wasn't
wild and crazy and quick on the trigger?  Justice against butcher-block
kitchens, Wendell?  Vengeance against subscriptions to The New Yorker,
there's that, too.  Celene's hostile reports from the teachers' room
echoed in her head: the Taverners, like Celene, had relatives scattered
in every town for miles around: aunts of every age; brothers-in-law with
guns in their pickups; illegitimate cousins.  Right now every inkblot on
their family history made them more appealingly vulnerable, more
familiar, more in need of protection-people would probably join up and
ride with them, if it came to that.  She could hear Jacob breathing, not
hard but fast, as if he'd been running.  She felt the blindness break up
into separate tears, a steady flow of them that rolled breakneck right
down her chin and off.  They beaded up on her sweater and skirt as if
she'd dropped a handful of sequins in her lap.

He was going up to Concord, then, for his own safety, to be held in the
youth facility until the first of his many hearings could begin.

They had gotten him back just to lose him again.  Once he gave her hand
a little tug-reassurance or a nervous quaver?  Tom Grady banged his
gavel, a ferocious crack as unexpected as gunshot.  This was supposed to
be the sound of the state speaking; it was harsh and inhuman, like a
tree falling, as impersonal as it could manage to be.  They sat in
silence until Fran, who scowled to deny he was secretly pleased, filled
in for the missing bailiff and came to take Jacob, not ungently, away.

It was no coincidence that she never even got to see him.  They could
have taken her to Cambridge and they didn't; they could have brought her
down to the trial-her father kept saying it wasn't a trial, it was "just
an arraignment-which-is-nothing"-but they didn't.  And when they came
back from it they didn't look like it was nothing either, and good for
them.  They went to sleep.  Or to bed anyway, as if the rest of the day
didn't interest them.  It got dark so early you could pretend it was
nighttime, she supposed, if you had to.  One way or another, they didn't
say much to her; both of them looked like they'd been hit in the
stomach, hard.

All of it went together; they had no respect for you if you were a
child.  They could forget about you or close the door on you, leave you
out as if you weren't even in the family.  But she knew Jacob would have
liked to see her, that was the other thing.  She understood some things
no grownup even remembered, and he would have appreciated that.

She was so angry they caught her crying when they got home.  She refused
to talk to them or even ask the questions that were burning on her
tongue: Did you find out about the postcards?  Did he admit anything?
Was he upset, or was he Good Ol' Mr.  Cool?  Was he downtown at the jail
now?  (One time, on a class trip, they got to see the lockup in the
basement, and it was too gross for human beingsnarrow little cells
smaller than closets, featuring a toilet bowl and a bunk that was welded
into the wall, in that order of appearance, so that the seatless bowl
was mostly what you saw.  People throw seats: everything was determined
by whether it could become a weapon!

What wasn't brick was black iron.  This place could make a saint into an
animal, she'd thought, though the cop who was showing them around-it was
Troy James's older brother, so it was hard to take him seriously; he and
Troy kept punching each other as if they were home-told them no one
stayed there more than overnight.  Mostly it was for drunks to sleep it
off and then go upstairs to the courtroom and get fined and sent back
out on the street.  Frankly, he admitted, nobody much tried to make a
weapon out of anything, they didn't have the energy, although people
sometimes tried to harm themselves.

Somebody once hung himself, Troy's brother didn't say how or why.

She had wondered then if killing yourself in jail meant you were guilty
or just ashamed.  Either way, it was too horrible and lonely to imagine
She had liked thinking about those weapons, though: she had once taken
what was called an "unusual uses" test at school to see if she should go
into a special enrichment class: What would you do with a brick that no
one else might think of?  A gum wrapper?  A snakeskin?

After the trip to the lockup she was obsessed with what, besides making
a club with it and trying to beat someone to the ground-boringyou could
do with a toilet seat, a coat hook, a desk drawer.

She didn't have to ask where he was.  "They're taking him to Concord,"
her mother had said first thing when she had hung up her coat.

Her eyes were red, her cheeks pale.  "It's a place that's all kids
waiting for the same thing, you know, for trials and other legal
business, so he'll have a lot of-company." She hesitated on the last
word: Judith could see her revulsion at the kind of people he'd be
living with.  Maybe he'd come out knowing how to be a real criminal.

If he came out.  And he was a criminal already.  She could not remember
that.

They thought she was crying for him.  She wanted them to know she was
angry at them, but that would have made her seem selfish.

All she could do was stand there and feel the facts, and her parents'
indifference to her, pelt down on her like cold rain.  "Jude, we'll go
up there as soon as they let us.  Not today, it's too late and he's got
to settle in."

Her father still hadn't said anything; he was a dangerous red, as if he
might explode any minute.  "Tomorrow, if you'd like to.  He wants to see
you."

Sure, she thought.  She couldn't help herself: "How do you know that?"

Then she could tell her mother was lying, no one had even mentioned her.
Her mother couldn't lie, it was one of her weaknesses.  All she could do
was bite on her lip until it got as red as her husband's face.

Judith might as well be invisible, not even live here-not even livefor
all anyone cared about her.  She swooped down on Snappy, who had come in
when her parents opened the door and was innocently, delicately, bobbing
up and down over her dry food.  She buried her wet face in the cat's
coat.  Cold.  It was cold and vaguely damp and smelled like her blanket,
woolly and nearly sweet.  Snap went soft when she squeezed, and made a
helpless noise down in her throat, pleasure and the hope that she'd hold
on.

Then her parents dragged up to bed like old people, and Judith sat in
the kitchen watching the sky turn from deep blue to purple to black,
trying to catch the changes as they happened; failing.

Yes, they visited.  She vowed to herself never to go back.

It was a bland, old-fashioned brick building, and he was up on the third
floor behind a door they had to buzz until someone came to let them in.
Judith couldn't decide whether the expressionless young woman who
gestured much too quickly in each direction at day room and library and
the "clients' " single rooms was an inmate or a staff member; she never
said.  (Clients?  What a funny word for kids who got caught and put
away.)  Heavy in her brown boyish corduroys, her lank reddish hair a
little ragged, the girl didn't look like she really wanted to be
bothered with them-all their smiling didn't get her to smile back.  She
brought them into the dining room (aqua plastic chairs, paintings that
looked as if the "clients" had done them for some class) and left them
to go find Jacob.

Judith crashed up against him like a bird flying into a brick wall.

Oh, he was handsome, his features clear and his eyes a penetrating
gray-blue.  The color of new jeans.  She searched them for pain, for
change at least, but couldn't find it there.  He stood straight as a
soldier as she said his name over and over, and looked at her with
distaste as If she were some nervy stranger petitioning him sloppily
with her love.

He even took a step backward, relieved, when she lowered her arms from
his neck.

She was never going to have him alone-it dawned on her as the smiling
director (bouncing along in clean sneakers like a gym teacher in need of
a whistle) showed them where they could Sit.  A brother is for
whispering to, for arguing with about what show, what channel.

When she was little he had fixed her dollhouse after two visiting
cousins, Uncle Stuie's boys, knocked the second-floor ceiling down and
demolished half the living-room furniture (and laughed and laughed about
it).  Ditto the hammock, which ripped under their weight when they threw
themselves into it-porky little jerks they were, overfed boys with
bangs-and Jacob had managed to get the complicated ropes braided back
together the right way, which took incredible patience and more brains
than she had.  He made the best gri1led I heese sandwiches.  He held
Snappy down so she could slip a new flea collar on.

He told ghost stories that really scared her.  He gave her his track
trophy to put up on her own shelf.  Hit her in the arm, sang with her in
the backseat of the car, dirtied up the lyrics of all the clean songs,
so that once she laughed so hard she wet her pants.  Told her secrets,
though apparently not the important ones.  Laughed outrageously at
nothing.  Mouthed off.  None of that was it, though.  It was hard to say
what he was, but it was more than the separate good things he did.

He was the backdrop, part of the natural world, that was all.  Just was.

Always was and had been, since the beginning.  She had a school friend,
Sandra Lee, whose brother was killed in a wreck on graduation night last
year-it was horrible, but it wasn't the same: he was gone.  Once and for
all gone, and everyone was devastated; it made him a hero, almost.  But
she didn't have Jacob back.  She didn't even have his shadow.  Her
parents did, they had what they needed, right?  Had got him back, safe
if not free.  She didn't have anything.

This place felt like school, falsely cheerful and disinfected.  There
were no private corners.  They had you flushed out into bright light.

She sat at the far end of the table and heard the dim mumble of her
parents' voices.  Once or twice he said something.  "Can I have my comic
books?"

"The ones with the sexy women?  All that cleavage, the boots and clubs?
Jacob." Why couldn't her father keep his mouth shut?

That was when Jacob gave her a long, penetrating look: You see?  She
tried to send back a signal: I do, I see exactly.  Anything he wanted.

Her mother was quiet.  She ran her fingertip back and forth on the edge
of the table until it got annoying.  This small talk was getting to her,
Judith could tell.  Her mother had told her once that she could never
just chat, it had been a problem when she was a teenager: she always had
purposes, she said, even if they weren't important purposes.

Her day was organized, it had a lot of work in it that she made for
herself.  Sure I had fun, she insisted-it just depends on what you call
fun.  She was already working after school in some kind of lab when she
was sixteen.  She bred flowers as a hobby, poking invisible pollen down
into the reproductive organs of lilies and tulips.  ("Sexy!" Jacob had
waved his hand as if the idea was too hot to touch.)  She wore matching
sweater-and-skirt sets and stockings.  No wonder she wasn't very good at
the random gabble of teenagers.  Judith wasn't so sure she'd have liked
her.  She saw her in homeroom, one of the geeksthe kind of girl
somebody's always turning to in those old movies, and taking off her
glasses, or pulling the pins out of her tightly wound hair, and
whispering with Surprise, "Why, you're-beautiful!"

Her father was talking so gleefully about this ADC place-they all
thought that meant Adolescent Detention Center, which made sense, but it
really meant Awaiting Disposition of the Court, which didn't sound so
much like a name as a problem-that you'd think he was trying to sell
Jacob on wanting to go there, like a college.  So they had TV and phone
privileges and someone would come in to do schoolwork with them.  She
could just imagine-she saw some of the others with their terrible skin
and their shambling uncooperative walks, saw how they were refusing,
just saying No!  to all that, to all the reasonable plans for their
vocational this and rehabilitation that.  Just because they had gotten
caught at something didn't mean they had to go soft and roll over.  She
wouldn't want to be their teacher, thank you.  She was somewhere in
between: could see how all the forced good cheer of strangers would just
make Jacob angry (and he was the polite type).

But she knew she'd always do what people wanted her to do and even find
some pleasure in it; would be just enough, push came to shove, like her
grim-faced mother.  They were two good girls who listened to reason,
which was soothing.  Which could always be argued for.

Who didn't like anger, or dumb resistance, or shows of force.  Geeks,
the kind who won medals at graduation from the American Legion.

God, she thought.  If I were somebody else, I wouldn't like me either.

She didn't bother to say another word to her brother.  In the car her
father chattered and then fell silent, and her mother looked bewitched
as if by some pain she couldn't place, or by a complex problem she was
trying to solve.  When she was thinking, she just disappeared.

Judith herself had been wondering how they would go about buying a
lawyer for her brother-that was what her father called it, as if he was
trying to be irritating.  It didn't make sense to do the cheap thing if
you could afford to do the expensive one: her mother had taught her that
about possessions-not that she threw money around, only that she
believed quality showed.  Her closet proved it-a small number of nice
things that fit beautifully, with fine details on them.

In the middle of one of their arguments about it, Judith thought her
father was going to strike her mother (though he had never done it).

She had always been terrified, far far down below the words to say it,
that sometime in one of his rages he would boil over and-without
planning to, he would never dream of doing such a thing, but in the
strange sleepwalking, anger-drunk state he passed into-he would whap her
mother in the face.

Then blackout.

That would be the end of their marriage, right then and there.  If her
father had pride, her mother had it even worse.

She looked at them now as they pulled into the garage, and all she saw
was distance, both of them someplace else, alone, brooding.  That was
all anyone did around here anymore.  They could be cheeiful sometimes
but they never seemed to forget, they only forgave, which you couldn't
trust because they kept a list of angers and they could whip it out in a
second.  She was used to a lot more of the noise of talk and laughing,
with somebody's favorite music-Schubert or Hammer or the Dead-always
floating in the background.  Every time she had a question for them, she
knew they'd look pained answering it.

For parents, they seemed very confused.  It was better to try to puzzle
things out for herself.

The spot where Jacob's old car usually sat had been empty for a long
time now.  Creepy, as if his car was his spirit and they had vanished
together.

When they got the woodstove going and took the chill off the room, her
mother opened two cans of tomato soup and put a steaming bowl in front
of Judith, with saltines and carrot sticks.  "Not much of a dinner,
honey.  I'm sorry." As if this wasn't the way it had been for weeks now,
catch-as-catch-can dinners and not much conversation at the table.  The
funeral food had stopped a long time ago, at their own request.  But
wouldn't it have stopped anyway, when the air of fresh emergency was
over?

"It's okay, I'm not hungry."

"We may suffer a little in the food department if we have to keep
driving to Concord."

"I said it's okay." It looked like a brimming bowl of blood to her, and
it smelled sour, like her memories of the day-are center.  She roiled
her spoon around in it awhile as if she was trying, just to get her
mother off her back, then went up to bed and undressed without turning
on the lights.  In the dark she imagined herself at that place Awaiting
Disposition of the Court-she had thought disposition had to do with
whether people were naturally nice or nasty-going to open the door for
visiting parents.  She would be kind to them because they'd all be
grieving and she'd pay special attention to brothers and sisters, who'd
be feeling lonely and scared.  She would have a room with a lock on it,
and she would make friends with older girls who had shoplifted what they
wanted and stole cars maybe, but underneath they would be basically
misunderstood and really very sweet, only with parents who never
listened to them, or drank, or beat up on them, or worse.  (Much worse
could happen, though the idea of your father stealing into your room and
making you do things was too sick to imagine.  The first times she'd
heard about it she was ready to say no, they're making that up, that
never could happen.  Yourfather who used to change your diapers!) She
fell asleep imagining herself the best worker in the dining room (where
the kids served and cleaned up and weren't allowed to complain).  She
would have the most energy and the best attitude.  Dis position.  She
would be a criminal-she never did figure out why she was there-and a
star at the same time, the director's favorite, the earner of every
privilege they had: late nights, free candy bars from the machine.  And
her parents would weep when they came to see her, and take her hands and
kiss them and not let go through the whole visit.

There were no secrets, not in this town.

Celeste met her the next morning where the bus dropped her off behind
the middle school.  She was hissing with excitement, breathing fog,
gray-blue like her cap and scarf, color of cigarette smoke.  "Did you
know she was pregnant?"

"What?" Judith asked.  "Who?" Her science book open on her lap on the
bus, she had been trying to picture an amoeba.

"Martha." Celeste had made Martha Taverner into a star in the movie of
her life.  "The autopsy report.  My father heard it, he was at the
Oddfellows and he's not supposed to know, but they're all talking about
it, so he said it wasn't any secret.  They found out she was having
ababy."

Her glee pushed Judith back a step.  Oh God, she thought, oh God, it was
all true then, her vision of her brother naked on the slim thighs of
that innocent-looking girl.  Batman at work, as evil as she'd understood
him to be, strange flesh that changed when it came near girls, and now
the whole world imagining them thrashing and panting.  All the Odd
Fellows.

"Two things," Celeste went on heedlessly, all of it good news, and
exhilarating.  "She was pregnant and-there was this cabin they went to?
Her friend, you know this girl Tina Guy, she says they always went
there, like after school and all, and they used it that day.  They
found, like, all kinds of stuff, cigarettes and cups and stuff, and
they're sure.

Judith hugged her books to her chest as if they might block out sound.
She was going to throw up, but she would fling herself under the bus
wheels before she'd do it here.  "Thanks a lot," she said and gave
Celeste a long, summarizing look, and walked as quickly as she could
across the blacktop that was striped with shiny patches like an iced
cake, toward the woods behind the playground.  They were shallow and
thin but no one could see her a few feet in.

She balanced her books delicately on a dry rock, pulled her jacket
clear, and bent over a little dip, a basin made by the drip of melting
ice, behind a scrawny pine.  All she could do was retch for a while, but
she closed her eyes and tried, and finally her breakfast came up on her.
It was yesterday's soup-imagining it viscous, blood-red, with the thin
scum of its chill across it in little wrinKles-that got her to heave up
her Wheatena and cocoa.  Let them set a bowl of blood in front of the
killer prince, thefather prince.  Batman a father.  And there was
nowhere she could go to get away from him.

Annie Dineen suggested she go shopping at the mall.

"Please, Annie!  I wouldn't do that in the first place, so why should I
do it in the second?"

"Take your mind off," Annie said.  "I'd suggest-tree pruning?  Or
fly-tying?  Fox hunting?  Anything if I thought it would help."

It was Judith, Carolyn decided, who could use some distraction.

The little girl-that's what she was, or used to be, before they were
dragged into all this-was so depressed these days, and who could blame
her-she seemed confused somewhere between wanting her parents to take
note of that and at the same time to ignore it, to notice her and then
leave her alone.

Well, nothing was as reliable for the purpose as the urgency of
acquisition.  The terms of the hunt were specific and finite: they went
in search of a new hat-and-glove set because the one Judith had was
"geeky"; they couldn't come home without a leotard, specifically in
purple or teal blue, for the honor of the gymnastics team.  And there
was some kind of blouse she absolutely needed that she couldn't describe
but would know when she saw It.

They started off gaily, fresh and untried.  Ben and Jacob had sports to
share, and all of them had certain family rituals, but shopping had
recently become their coinage, somehow, as it had been hers and her
mother's.  (Her sister had noisily, contemptuously opted out every
chance she got.)  She could see a feeling of happy well-being envelop
Judith, exactly the way her face could look deeply
satisfied-I'min-my-seat-all's-right-with-the-worldand-I-evenhavea-gianttubof
popcorn-heavy-on-the-butter-as the coming attractions flashed past at
the movies.  You could probably brainwash the whole generation to do
your bidding if only the Cineplex Odeon music preceded the command, or
the AMC logo, AND N0W 0UR FEATURE PREsENTATI0N!, bright shiny letters
flying off the screen into the dark.

Carolyn suggested that Judith bring some tapes-the nearest mall was a
long ride, far enough away to feel like an outing.  What careened around
them in the car was mostly rhythm.  She asked dutiful questions: Why is
Janet Jackson so popular?  Was she finished with Michael, wasn't he
passe?  Were any of them heroes to her?  ("Heroes?" Judith echoed
blankly.  It was too serious a question, an adult intrusion.  "You mean,
do I think of them, like, in real life?") The drive took three-quarters
of an hour through green country and suburbanized farm towns whose huge
colonial houses were fair game for commerce if they faced the road- I I
s I I I c I and CARPETS and group practices.  Judith chattered about
school friends, a teacher who was about to be fired for being too mean,
her new interest which just might lead her-"maybe, maybe," she said
almost prayerfully-to ask for riding lessons.  The more frivolous the
conversation, the more Carolyn could feel her neck and shoulders relax.
She told Judith stories about elementary school, and how-hadn't she ever
heard this?-she took the train alone to Chicago when she was eleven and
fell asleep and didn't wake up until they were in Denver.

The traffic began to bunch up near the mall, and by the time they
maneuvered through the parking lot and found a space, they were ready
for lunch.  They went off giggling guiltily, swinging hands, to find
some food.  Judith was delighted.  "We haven't even worked yet!"

Carolyn was happy on the one hand, sad on the other, because this was
exactly the kind of weightless pleasure she never had time for with her
daughter.  It was hard to be grim here, or to believe in things like
actions and consequences.  The first good thing she'd found to say about
catastrophe was that she could take the day off and no one cared.

And it was intoxicating: lights reflecting in mirrors, a woman in a
white coat like a doctor, Coming at them with an atomizerful of
something heavy and expensive and suggestively named-Carolyn waved her
away as if she were a swarm of attacking flies, but Judith gratefully
gave her a wrist and couldn't stop sniffing it as they rode up the
escalator.  The tables were piled with color, neatly folded, and music
filled the air around them, gentle jazz to keep their pace up.  She felt
drunk walking through it all: irresponsible, obscurely stimulated,
utterly unreal.  "Hats," she said to Judith.  "Business.  Hats and
gloves.

Where would they be?"

"Oh, look, Mom!  Wouldn't you look beautiful in this?  This is soyou!  "
They stopped to consider a dark satin blouse with a deep red yoke.  "It
would be so nice with your hair.  Ooh!"

Carolyn laughed.  "You sound like you're in pain!  Judith, what do I
need dressing-up clothes for right now?  Really-"

"Oh, Mom, need!  Just try it on, oh please.  I just want to see it on
you.  Isn't it-luscious?" Carolyn could hear her trying the word; she
and Celeste probably had a whole new vocabulary for their vanity, their
hopeful judgments, their desperations.

For Judith's sake, she pulled down the hanger and took it into the
dressing room along with a pair of lounging slacks in the same dark
satin, like a night sky not quite black yet.  They were as thick and
smooth as wet paint.

Judith sat on a stool admiring as Carolyn pulled her sweater off over
her head.  "You have such a nice neck." She seemed eager to be
childlike, fawning.  Anything you want, Carolyn thought.  Sweet child,
anything.  "I've got these horrible collarbones." Judith made a gaunt
face.

Gravely, they discussed bones and shoulder blades.  "They'll fill out,
Jude, I promise you.  I was so scrawny you wouldn't believe it.  Size
three on top."

Judith, frowning, raised her shoulders to make her hollows even
hollower.  "And I'll never have-you know." She gestured at Carolyn.

"Which is fine.  Except my clothes look so empty!" Judith had only
bought her first bra this year-her gymnast's body, its purity of line,
its innocent asexual firmness, nearly brought tears to Carolyn's eyes.

She could feel Judith studying her, wondering what it felt like to be so
soft and rounded, to stand there in your lacy white full slip, then drop
it and step into black satin and button it, turning more glamorous with
every inch of flesh you covered up.  "Nice," she said and reached out to
pat it as if it were fur.  "You look like a movie star.  Are you going
to get it?"

"Oh, Judith, what would I do with it?  We're not going out to very many
dinner parties, you know." (As if they ever dressed for them, anyway.)
She turned and looked at the long line of her back.  It was terrific,
actually-surprisingly graceful, a costume out of someone else's life. Or
would a little vanity, some care for herself, be good for her right now?

"I think you should get yourself something extravagantly beautiful!"

Judith said rapturously and put her arms around her mother's waist.

"I think you should put it on after supper and turn all the lights down
and go in and surprise Daddy.  He'll say, 'Who is this fabulous woman?

Is she the one who's been so-'" That musky perfume Judith had acquired
downstairs seemed to surround them both.

"Judith!" She was pleading, laughing.  "Have mercy!" Who's been so-no
need to finish it.

A gang of high-school girls swept into a couple of dressing rooms across
the way, noisy, full of brazen exclamation.  "Wait till he sees this, he
will just lie down and roll over!"

"So will your mother.  Jeez, Nicole, you'll never even get out of the
house in that.  They'll lock you up!"

"Oh, give me a break.  Here, what happens if the zipper's down just a
little.  Look."

Judith tensed and pressed her head to her mother's shoulder.  Carolyn
watched her freeze, she could feel her skinny elbows sharp against her
waist; Judith had a sickened look around her mouth.  Fabulous women and
fabulous girls, then, were not the same thing.

"That is so cool!" They exploded into self-satisfied laughter.

"Wait, wait," Nicole called out.  "look, when I roll the bottoms up.

Hey, what a difference.  Oh, wow!"

"Oh God, I ruined it!" Judith said against her mother's collarbone.

"What?" Carolyn pulled back and looked at her and then down at the front
of her blouse.

"Tears on your shirt.  Oh, look what I did.  These splotches."

Dear God.  "Not to worry, honey.  We'll hang it up and it'll be fine."

She smoothed her daughter's hair.  "Nobody can trace tears." She pulled
a handkerchief out of her purse.  Judith wiped her face and handed it
back to her.  She held the hanky to her own face and breathed once,
twice, three times, slowly, restoratively, in the dark.  Then she opened
her eyes on the megawatt dazzle and willed it to take her back out of
herself again.

He was from Manchester, an in-state boy, to assuage me.  Wendell knew
him well.  "The best.  Better than the best," he said, but the
imperfection of my faith in Wendell's judgment was surely not
discussable.

"He's one of these characters whore eaten up by their cases."

"Great.  You think there'll be a bite or two left for the trial?"

"No, Ben, listen.  With this guy, if there's any chance that there won't
be a trial, you've got it.  He's lost one case in his lifetime.  This
man is totally devoted to defense.  He lives poor-he's one of these
old-time types like a country doctor, you could imagine him living
behind his office.  I mean it.  And the state won't give you any trouble
over him."

"But I I I I I take the full amount anyway I I I "Well." Wendell
straightened the knot in his tie.  "But you'll get more than your
money's worth, I promise you.  look, go see him.

Interview the hell out of him, make him prove he's worth his fee.  He's
right up the road in Manchester.  Go on."

On the way we talked about the gossip.  The little fucker couldn't keep
his zipper up, I started out, but then I have to admit a single long
look out from under Carolyn's eyebrows silenced me.  The hypocrisy, all
right.  She didn't have to say it: How old was I when I found my first
willing woman?  How old when I was desperate and only lacked somebody
who wanted me back?  I was older than Jacob the first time, but not by
much and not by choice.  I could still imagine the rank gray sheets we
made even ranker (the borrowed bed in the studio of my friend Maxie down
on Wooster Street), a girl named Theda and me.  I thought I'd die of it,
I couldn't understand why half the world didn't suffer heart attacks at
climax.  Well, maybe they do, Theda had said, straightforward as she was
in all things, including sex-she never promised what she wouldn't give.
How would you know?  We made up honest obituaries, I remember: Mr. Jones
expired after three rounds of Miss Smith.  Mr.  Williams passed on when
Mrs. Williams climbed on top of him and covered his face with her hair.

John and Joan Johnson died simultaneously.  Suicide, we laughed, and
reached out for each other.

"It could be the motive," Carolyn said and didn't look at me.

"If you say motive, it means you believe it."

She gave a bitter half laugh, a sort of aborted bark.  "lflo you manage
not to believe it?  Since when?"

I would have had trouble saying what I thought: that whether he did it
or whether, miraculously, he didn't, I had lost faith in knowing
anything.  How could it matter what I believed, I couldn't imagine what
his head was full of.  His memories, now, were his own-well, they always
had been, of course, only it wasn't so visible-and his motives, too.

You start out thinking your child's life is in your hand, you can hold
it all right there: he's with you all the time, that little baby.  If he
plays with friends you're there, you referee the squabbles.  Carolyn and
I took turns.  (If anything, I took some of her turns.)  You buy the
toys, you close him in the yard where he'll be safe.  And you think you
know the whole cast of characters in his head, the scary parts, and the
sweet dreams.  Only, one night he has a nightmare.  It rips his sleep in
two, and yours as well.  You rush in, pull him from his crib as if it's
on fire and comfort him against your shoulder-and he can't tell you a
thing.  Or a word or two he gives you, a hint, a clue to where the
monster came from-oh, that terrible movie, as if you need Walt Disney to
make nightmares.  It's huge and hairy and it was right behind him.  Or
he fell from a cliff onto the rocks below.  Whatever.  Where did he get
that from?  He doesn't watch violence on the tube.  He's never had a
trauma.  Spontaneous combustion is what it is.  The little microbes grow
in the warmth of his head, that moist medium.

Then he matures a little out of eyeshot: down at the day care, where he
has experiences you never hear about, little ones too insignificant to
report.  Ginny pushed him off the swing, Seth gave him his cupeake at
lunch.  Good, bad, invisible all of it.

The arrogance.  The chutzpah.  It's his life, even if it's small, and
hedged by adult watchers.  It's his life.  But it's a long way from that
to knocking up a woman, and a long way, I realized with a shock that was
almost electric in its violence, between the young father I was and the
grandfather he'd have made me.  Would have, could have, except for Death
Intervening: it rolled over me like a sheet pulled up over my face.

"It would help," I ventured, "if he'd talk to us a little.  It really
would."

"When he comes home," she said.  "When we get him bailed.  Maybe he'll
be more himself at home.  He looks like he's-blinded-in these places.
Blinded by the lights."

"You mean figuratively."

She sighed.  "Figuratively."

I thought about that girl pregnant, the carelessness.  Idiots.

So he was upset by that, or guilty, or scared.  A dozen or's,
interchangeable at this distance.  I didn't even know what we'd tell the
lawyer except Please.  Whatever it takes.

If it hadn't been for his name, I'd have taken him for Jewish.  Demaris,
though: Panos.  Manchester's very Greek.  He was small, swarthy, quick,
my age, maybe younger, with a lot of dark hair in what would have been a
pompadour a generation ago.  His pants wcre slightly belIed-Jacob would
laugh-a wimpy light blue you'd more likely find on a furniture salesman
than on the best defense attorney in sight.  Most of the lawyers were on
Elm Street in the slick new buildings.  He was in a house, not quite
Victorian, on a side street near downtown.  The house, he told us later,
was in the family, at a distance; Greek families are nice to each other.
He had a deal he couldn't have gotten for a better address.  "If you
keep your overhead down, you can take the work that needs taking," he
said.  "Why should I take it from you and kiss it while it goes by on
its way to the landlord?"

Oh God, we were wary.  His receptionist told us to have a seat in the
tiny living roomlwaiting room, and we went sniffing around as if the
man's magazines (a wide variety: Golfirs Digest to Smithsonian to some
kind of hot-rod fanzine-for kids in trouble?) would tell us something
profound.  His plants were the kind that lived without a lot of
attention, spiky unendearing things, and the walls were done in Greek
Restaurant posters: the aching blue of the Aegean, the stone steps of
island villages.  White-domed chapel, white houses over the steep, rocky
fields.  Free from another relative, I'll bet.  I watched Carolyn for a
reaction; she was showing none.  Curiosity, but so far nothing else.
When she held judgment in abeyance there was an unnatural look to her, a
quality of strained silence that was very noisy indeed.  The scientist
gathering evidence, being scrupulously neutral, before she dares a
hypothesis.  Fair enough.  I was inclined to like him for the sheer
perversity of his unstylish digs.  But I had to watch that: you can be
hung for a populist as easily as for an aristocrat.  It depends on who's
in power.

He came out himself, walking fast.  "Panos Demaris," he said, and I
could feel us being sucked up into his gaze, which was fiercer by far
than mine or Carolyn's.  His handshake was emphatic.  I saw he even took
corners at a slight tilt, as if they were banked, so he wouldn't have to
slow down.

A deep silence overtook us, though, when we were all seated in his
office; only the leather chairs squawked.  It was a vastly populated
place, black-and-white photos of historical figures, Manchester
dignitaries and maybe national ones as well, and what had to be family
everywhere, children, grandmothers, and dozens in between.  He waited us
out.  All I could think of was my shrink saying nothing, with
infuriating patience, the one who helped me through art school by
hearing me take my family apart and put it back together a little
differently.  Demaris's family on the wall could have been mine, I
thought, a little weary-all those people who love us too much and
(because of that, I suppose; because they ask too much) whom we fail.

I wondered if Greek families smothered their children.  The question
answered itself.

Finally Carolyn ventured forward, or we'd still be sitting there.

"Wendell Bye told you about us."

He raised an eyebrow: not a contradiction.

"Our son-" He wanted to hear what we'd say.  He looked from her to me. I
had to say something, so I trusted my voice and added, "He's seventeen.

A high-scbool junior."

"He's accused," Carolyn went on and pulled the Velcro tab on her
shoulder bag so that it sounded like a bandage being torn from flesh,
"of killing a girl.  A classmate.  A girlfriend." She pulled out a
peachcolored tissue and held it tight, just in case.  "We don't have the
slightest idea if he did or not."

"God," I said, knowing it was stupid but wanting, I suppose, to
establish something with this man, "did you ever used to read Donald
Duck in the funnies?  We sound like those nephews of his, you know,
Huey, louie and Dewey, who split up their speeches between the three of
them?"

Carolyn looked at me astonished.  I had no idea how to read Panos
Demaris's face.  The man spends a lot of time in front of juries.

Then we told him everything we knew-minus the parts I'd erased, it
amounted to slightly more than nothing.  He took notes but ventured no
opinions.  Which did not mean he didn't have them.

"Do you have to believe somebody's innocent to take his case?"

There was Carolyn again with her naive high-minded irrelevant question.
I wasn't afraid she'd bolt and tell him about the jack, no way would she
do that.  I think she wanted to establish her eccentricity, which was
not (like his) her style, but her purity and innocence.  Her moral
earnestness.  I thought she looked silly at it.

He laughed quietly, maybe patronizingly, maybe with appreciation.

He was not a noisy man, only an energetic one who had trouble sitting
still.  "I work with a lot of juveniles," he said, "who are in every
kind of trouble you can think of.  A lot of them haven't been innocent
of any accusation you'd care to lay on them since they were four.  But
they still deserve a good defense."

How nice to be so resolved.  "How do you know he'll talk to you?"

I asked.

	 It was a cliche, I could have seen it in a movie at the end
of a scene just like this one-probably had seen it already-but I liked
it in proportion to how much I needed to hear it.  "He'll talk to me."
He breathed out hard and beat a little tattoo on the desk with his index
fingers, as if he were impatient to get started.  "I can't promise you
he'll tell me the truth, but he'll talk to me, if that's what's worrying
you.

Carolyn drove home and I closed my eyes.  I saw Panos Demaris and
Carolyn and some old woman in black, a woman of Samos or Siphnos, or
maybe Vilna or Minsk, who walked between them.  They were strolling
casually together in a field, not close together, walking down toward
the sea.  She was going away with him, that was clear, but I Wasn't in
the dream at all, except, I suppose, as the eyes that saw them getting
smaller and smaller, like people in one of those posters.  She was going
to be his, but I didn't object.  I didn't have to watch.  I opened my
eyes and saw Carolyn's tight face as she accelerated to pass a truck.

I guess I considered mastery and virility interchangeable.  How about
mastery and victory, though?

I wondered if he had other clothes to wear to court.

We seemed to be on the road all the time.  We went to see Jacob
apparently so I could try to small-talk about TV programs and the NBA,
and came home furious and exhausted from the effort of confronting
nothing.  Judith refused to come, for reasons she kept obscure, and
Carolyn, Jacob, and I killed time like three other people we'd never
been properly introduced to.  And after he'd been to visit the AbC
facility, we went to Manchester to talk to Demaris.  I wondered if
they'd talked basketball.

"He's a smart boy," he told us, minus the details.  "I like him.  Do you
mind if I eat while we talk?" It was three-thirty.  He unwrapped a gyro
sandwich from greasy white paper and bent low over it, shoulders
practically to the desk to protect his shirt.

"Is this late lunch or early dinner?" Carolyn asked.  It was clear he
perplexed her-one of the things that make us very different is that she
doesn't have a whole lot of tolerance for eccentricity unless it serves
a purpose.

"Breakfast, I think.  I had a pretrial meeting and I never did stop."

He seemed to be as committed as Wendell had promised: he didn't take
vacations, he drove a disreputable car.  ("Come now," he'd said when a
New York cousin had suggested that his car was an embarrassment to a
member of the professional community.  "This is New Hampshire.  I'd be
embarrassed to drive anything better.") Still, he didn't hesitate to
tell us we weren't what he had in mind when he took "needy" cases cheap.
"Admit it, do yourselves and me the favor of a good hard look," he'd
said very simply and maybe a little wearily.

"No matter how you're hurting financially from all this, and I'm sure
you are, look: I just finished a case for a kid who lives in the
projects over there." He led us over there with his chin.  I didn't know
Manchester had projects.  "A kid who sleeps in the living room on
chairs.

Every time he gets taller, they add another chair." Shrug.  He knew when
to shut up.

More small talk.  Around now, my foot begins to bounce: Well?

Well?  Well?

"Okay.  He's still not saying anything.  I asked him if he understood
what the situation looks like-you run away, you're going to look guilty
of something-and he seems to.  But he won't even try to talk his way out
of it-I think he's probably just being a kid, you know, you see this.
Hoping if he can hang tough long enough it'll all go away." The meat in
his sandwich looked like dirty washcloth.  He swallowed a big piece. "So
I told him, look, I don't really want to have to write your story for
you, but I will if I have to.  If you don't help me out, I will.  I can
come up with some plausible enough stuff -there's not-guilty-by-reason I
fincapacity-you're drunk.  You're high.  You know.  Insanity's no good
up here, you don't want to use that with a New Hampshire jury if you
have any other choice, they're not friendly to people who are too-too
different from what they think they are." He laughed with a kind of awe.
"Whatever they really are, of course.  But up here you're supposed to
have some control of yourself, more than most places, I think.  It's not
a real generous climate, you understand, if you claim you were crazy the
way the courts want you to be crazy-it all looks too convenient, a
category of impaired moral judgment but you don't look nuts, swing from
the trees, what-ever.  You know-being clear about the difference between
right and wrong-it's an unsatisfactory definition to everyone who uses
it and everyone it's used against."

"A moral category," I said.

"With an odd pragmatic twist.  They fight each other." He shrugged.

"So then there's self-defense, there's-well, we've got a few more tricks
in the bag.  But we shouldn't have to be writing this for him, you know?
We shouldn't have to use a crowbar to get his mouth open like this.  And
we have to know what we're up against.  What are they going to find.
What kind of material evidence do they have." These were statements, not
questions.  In that form they were especially terrifying.

'He'd better give it some hard thought, you know?  Because I can't do
this myself." He swallowed the last of his sandwich with an audible
gulp.  "Let me ask you a couple of questions about Jacob, if I might.

I have to get a bead on him, okay?" He got up and walked around a
little, then suddenly bent to a crouch, bounced a few times on his
haunches, hard, and came back up.  "My circulation stops, I can feel it.
My blood must be coagnlating."

"Too much retsina," I suggested.  "As long as your brain stays fluid,
that's all we ask."

Panos laughed.  But his change of pace was quick as a snake's fang.

"Do you think Jacob tends to level with you about most things?"

I began my answer before the question was out.  "Do you mean, are we
close?"

"No, that's not the same thing.  I only mean factual things: does he
tend to tell the truth?"

Carolyn looked at me.  He didn't lie, did he?  "Not particularly," she
said.  "I can't think-you mean, very little things?  He says he's taken
out the garbage but he hasn't?  That kind of thing?"

Panos nodded.  "Well, that's a teenager for you.  I've got a couple, God
help us.  I mean maybe slightly larger things.  Where he's going, where
he's been.  Where he gets his money, that kind of thing."

"He's about average, I think," I said.

"No, wait, Ben.  Do you think everybody has these shouting matches at
three in the morning?  I wonder if he's not a little-"

"But that's not lying.  It's just not, I don't know, it's not what you'd
call good reporting.  He doesn't see the need.  I don't think most kids
his age see it, not till they get to be parents themselves.  Panos, he's
a very ordinary boy."

"Ever steal anything that you know of?  Even petty crimes?"

"He's a slob," I put in, thinking hard.  "Sometimes he's too
disorganized to get his act together.  So he ends up with-oh, I remember
once he told me-way later, he told me-that he never handed in his pledge
money for a walkathon, he kept forgetting to bring it in to school.
About seventy bucks, I think it was for multiple sclerosis.  Or wait,
no.  Muscular dystrophy, I mean.  The Jerry Lewis thing.  Whatever.  So
he just kept the money.  Venial sins."

I remembered the bills he'd taken from Carolyn's purse.  It felt like a
betrayal to say anything about them, though I didn't know why.

She must have felt it, too-she kept her mouth shut.

But we told him a thousand inconsequential things about Jacob, from his
prowess with computers-a kid of his time-to his mediocre wrestling and
his will to win at least one match this year.  His allergy to peanuts,
his volunteer work reading stories one summer at the Old Age Home.  (He
sounded unlikely, a paragon.  I didn't quite recognize him.)  I said he
still had friends from grade school.  Also new ones he never brought
home, for what that meant, shyness, embarrassment, who could tell.  I
told him Jacob liked to help me in my workshop when he could, or used
to, how we'd talk about everything, while we shaped and sanded and
glued, from art to sports to other kids, even a little about girls.  I
never knew if he was open with me, how could I tell?  I thought we were
close.  This was a while ago, though.  Before he could drive.  Maybe
before he had secrets, I don't know.  A couple of times I credited him
when I showed my work: A Collaboration by Benjamin and Jacob Reiser.

Did we see ourselves as out of the ordinary?

"In general, you mean, or in Hyland?" I asked.

"Either.  Both."

Carolyn and I looked at each other, uncertain.  "In general it's hard to
say, Carolyn began.  "You know, you can't see yourself without a
context.  So-" She shrugged.  "In New York, where we came from, no, we
were about a dime a dozen."

"Nickel," I suggested.

"But here-Hyland.  Well.

"In Hyland," I went on, "we are and aren't unique.  I mean, I have a
poker game-had, I guess-with a real mixed crew, a guy who cleans
chimneys, one who does insurance, and a jazz pianist who teaches band at
the high school.  So it depends on what you want to look at.  We belong
to the PTO, Carolyn sings in the chorus.  We don't want to be out of the
ordinary.  We didn't come up here to stand out."

"On the other hand," Carolyn said a little stiffly, "I'm a physician and
my husband is a sculptor, so .  .  .  There's a certain complicated
status in those.  Hyland is a rural town going a little suburban,
getting a little too classy for some people.  But there have always been
a lot of people with money who haven't had to work for it, sort of old
Boston, and to them I suppose we're just-"

"Working stiffs," I said.

"So your status shifts all the time.  Depending on who's doing what for
whom.  And who you're talking to.  Just about everybody has some kind of
authority."

"And the girl's family?  The Taverners?"

We sighed.  "Martha's father," Carolyn ventured, "is one of those men
who've never quite-gotten themselves together, I think.  He's had a
drinking problem.  He seems pleasant, I think he's funny, isn't he, Ben?
He and some other men in town used to do, sort of, practical jokes. They
once painted the street purple in front of the Town House.

I don't remember why.  And they hooked up some kind of record to the
fire alarm that time, some song, and played it all around town?"

She looked fairly helpless.  "I don't really know Mrs.  Taverner.  But
they have a lot of advocates in Hyland.  You understand that.  They grew
up here, they have family here, they have the advantage of-"

"Belonging," I said.  "Whatever their virtues or ours, Mr.  Demaris, the
town is a little more theirs than it is ours.  I imagine you'd recognize
the situation.  Plus, you know, factor this in, that we're Jewish.  Less
than a minority."

"And has that caused problems?"

"Well, whatever they're Saying among themselves, some people are very
respectful, actually.  I guess it's better than being completely
godless.  But somebody once told me," I said to him, and my mouth felt
full of dust, "that if everything went well, we'd never hear about it.
But if anything ever went wrong-"Panos looked at us hard, without a
flicker.  I daresay he was wondering if we were snobs who couldn't admit
it or true egalitarians with our anKles in a trap.  Wondering if there
was anybody left in Hyland to love us.  He waited a few beats till
everything settled.

"Okay," he said then.  "Back to Jacob." It felt like a long way back.

He tapped on his forehead with the eraser at the end of his pencil.

"You're describing a pretty regular kid.  As you say.  Let me ask you
-now try to take this as a neutral question, okay?  It's not an
accusation.  Would you say Jacob has any particularly-any psychological
problems that you've been at all concerned about?"

So we listened to Panos try to defuse the accusation (because, of
course, there was an accusation, a vague one, hidden in his palm): "But
anger," he said.  "This is very important.  Please listen.  Loes Jacob
have any particularly severe problems with expressing anger?  Does he
tend to keep things bottled up?  Does he ever explode?  When a kid stays
as-quiet-as he's staying .

Carolyn reached for my arm and gently put her hand on it.  Whether she
thought she had to restrain me or comfort me, I don't know.  Before we
could say anything, Panos continued, not at all defensively but still in
that conspiratorial don't-tell-the-children half whisper, "You really
need to know something, Mr.  and Mrs.  Reiser." He smiled.

"Mr.  and Doctor?"

"Ben and Carolyn," she said.

"Ben and Carolyn, then.  I have the preliminary police report, the
medical examiner's report-these things they have to give us, of
course-and you need to understand that whether whatever Jacob finally
tells us is true or not true-hard for us to say, right, until we hear
it?  But you need to understand that this report describes a head wound
to the girl that was not the result of a single blow.  It reports a
bludgeoning so severe and repeated that-" He sighed, a long, whistling
sigh like that of a runner coming to rest.  "The details don't-they'd
only add to your distress unnecessarily.  The point is, he hit her once
and then apparently he hit her again and went on hitting her, thus, you
see- Of course, that's usually how it is.  If you hit somebody once, you
tend to go on."

He had lifted his head for a minute; he'd delivered most of this matter
I ffact speech to the paper his sandwich came in, opened up there on his
desk like a huge white sharp-petaled flower.  I was listening, hungry
for anything.  If Jacob gave us some parts, even random bits, we could
begin constructing something.  But he glanced up and saw Carolyn
dissolving as he spoke.  She had her hands to her face, as if, eyes
covered, she wouldn't have to hear it.  "Oh, now-please, Dr. Reiser.
Why have-" Carolyn slapped at the air in front of her face.  'You can't
do that!' she cried out at him, and her face was awful, twisted the way
I've never seen it, between disgust and-I don't know what it was. Horror
at her own disgust, maybe.  "You can't just guess what might have
happened-what he I I I I I saying-like I I I I a bunch of ordinary
every-day events like that!  Jesus," she said, breathiess, and she put
one open hand over her eyes.  "How do you expect us to survive this?"

Panos Demaris looked at me very quickly.  If she saw it I know it only
made her angrier-the man checking with the other man: Does this happen
to her often?

She wasn't finished.  "Just because you hear this kind of thing every
day.  You spend your time with horrible, violent people-" She stood up
and her chair would have fallen over if I hadn't managed to steady it.
"Please, Mr.  Demaris.  This is the first time we've had to hear this
kind of thing."

He looked pained.  "Is it?  You're very lucky, then." He gave her a
smile he'd have regretted had he known her better.

"Don't patronize me, sir.  I see plenty of awful violence and pain.

I'm a physician and there isn't a lot I haven't seen." She had the
tissue baIled in her fist, but she'd be damned if she'd use it and look
like a lady dabbing her eyes at curtain call.  "Ben, help me.  How can I
say this?" Her voice threatened to give out on her.  "This is my son
you're talking about."

"You might be surprised, Doctor, to remember that it is always
somebody's son.  Or daughter.  Even if he's been in trouble before.  All
this may be very sharp and fresh for you and that's one factor, I
suppose, in the kind of pain it's giving you.  It's hard to come to
terms with the shock of it.  But the mothers whose sons have been
through everything already come in here so weary that they aren't
actually much better protected than you are." He looked straight at her,
intensely focused on her eyes.  "They're like-well, I can imagine
patients, maybe, who have no immune systems left, who've been weakened
by all their previous assaults.  So, if I might-I don't want to detract
one iota from what you're feeling, but I have to say this-don't assume
this is harder for you than it is for anyone else."

He was calling her on her self-righteousness.  She closed her eyes.

I don't know what she was telling herself.

"Are you asking me for a more-delicate-presentation of the
possibilities?  Or would you prefer different facts?  Because he could
give you those if he wanted to cooperate.  But I'm not sure you'd like
them much better."

She had her composure back.  That would be the last cri de coeur he was
going to hear from her.

"I'm not unsympathetic, please don't infer that from all this.  This has
nothing to do with sympathy.  But, Dr.  Reiser, I thought you told me
you had seen the corpse."

"The corpse!  It wasn't any corpse, it was a girl I knew.  All right.

Enough," Carolyn said.  "God, I sometimes think I'm getting callous from
seeing one too many-c:orpses.

Panos Demaris drained his can of diet soda.  "These are the param eters
that have to be sketched in before we can do anything else." He was
going to keep his distance.  I sympathized.  "I'm sorry.  I regret them.
But they're unavoidable.  Meanwhile, Jacob.  He'll come around
eventually, I can guarantee he'll get tired of this game.  He's wasting
time, and I wish-ah, well.  Sometimes when they get away from the
institutional setting, you know, that'll do it.  There's something
poisonous about being watched twenty-four hours a day, it doesn't
exactly encourage spontaneity." He smothered his mouth and chin in a
giant paper napkin.  "Then there are some procedural matters, of course.
I have a great deal of careful work to do and how you-I-we-feel about
the case isn't going to matter very much, unfortunately." He ran his
hand over his cheeks; they looked ready for a late-afternoon shave.  I
could see why Wendell had said he was like a country doctor-he was stern
but not harsh.  He had, I thought with some gratitude, no side to him.

On the way to the car I touched her arm as tenderly as I could get
myself to.

"Because he sounded like a goddamn police report.  Here's Jacob
stock-still like a deer in the headlights, you know-just paralyzed-and I
expect this guy to start talking any minute about the alleged
perpetrator, the way they do.  Where the hell were you, I'd like to
know, you and your famous anger?"

That roughness didn't sound like her.  She was the woman who had been so
nice to Fran Conklin when he came as the messenger.  I wasn't sure what
it was about Panos that had bothered her so.  "Oh, Carolyn.

You were so busy being hostile and what I was hearing was somebody
trying to understand.  But you can't blame him for being
exasperated-he's got a job to do and he isn't getting any help, let
alone gratitude, from any quarter."

She ignored that.  "I can see that the price of having this demon for
the defense is that we're going to be condescended to endlessly about
how much poorer other people are, and how much more they've suffered.
Can't you see the man's got it in for people like us, Benny?

We're useful just to float his business so that he can minister to the
more deserving."

I told her that was a willful exaggeration.

"Forget it," she said, with the weariest look.  "I wish he'd eaten
before we got there.  We're paying for his time and he's dining.  All
that greasy disgusting food dripping down."

"Try a little charity for a change," I suggested to my wife, who could
look elegant even in despair.  Only the rest of the world ate with its
mouth full.  "Do you think he'd do better by Jacob on an empty stomach?"

The first news story that mentioned Jacob by name declared him an adult.
"Today you are a man used to be the greeting on a boy's Bar Mitzvah day;
lacking that semi-official optimism, Carolyn supposed only the boy
himself, and his attentive parents, dare put a date on his coming I
fage.  But for Jacob the court conferred maturity and it was a defeat,
though not a surprise.  Nothing good issued from it: all it meant was
consequences more dire and long-lasting than they meted out to
"juveniles," and far less leniency.  Panos Demaris said it was
inevitable and enjoined them from becoming depressed: a seventeenyear I
ld accused of murdering a girl, he said, sounds about as seasoned as
they come.  There is no court that would not have found that way.

It also meant that his anonymity was gone, though in a place like Hyland
that had been a joke from day one.  It felt like a good time to leave
town.  Her parents had suggested that Hilton Head was lovely even in
this season, more temperate by far than New England in winter.  "We have
all your birds down here, dear!" her mother enticed her.  "You'd
recognize some of them."

Carolyn thanked her politely but told her she'd have to await a more
promising time.  "We have bail to deal with, Mom, and then, God, a grand
jury.  I'm not really sure what that'll mean, but I do know it means
we're not going anywhere." How casual that sounded, how cheerfully
routine.

They repulsed reporters, trying to be kindly; probably, after the third,
failing.  Carolyn especially resented the one who, camera in hand,
threatened that if no one in the house consented to an interview, people
would tend to draw their own conclusions.  "Draw whatever you want to,"
she had said to him in a voice that felt sore with repressed fury.

"You might try to remember the rudiments of law that say someone
innocent unless proven otherwise."

"Oh please," the young man had said, as if that one had gone out with
the bunny hop.  Very young.  She was rooting, as she closed the door
firmly on him, for his writing hand to wither and fall off.

She wished she worked downtown in an insurance office where the worst
that could happen might be that someone would cut her dead as she handed
over a policy, or behind the counter at the laundry, where people
wouldn't feel themselves intimately contaminated by her hands.

Her patient load had dwindled to the point where she had to release
Karen to find a job with a reliable payroll.  "You'd think you had
AIDS," Karen said to her furiously, in tears.  "You'd think you could
hurt their little precious by breathing on him.  Oh, Carolyn, I don't
get it!"

Carolyn made herself smile.  "You've come to the wrong place if you
think I can explain." Even the other doctors at the hospital were
cool-civil but wary.  She had heard that Tom McAnally was outraged that
she had come down to look at Martha's body the day she was murdered. Did
he think she knew something about Jacob's involvement, that he had come
to her confessing, whereupon she'd gone coolly back to work behind a
mask of innocence?  Where was his good sense, not to mention his
compassion?  Apparently, doctors didn't have one whit more than
civilians.

She held Karen to her, smoothed her already smooth hair.  Karen had
promised to come back when the cloud moved on.  Carolyn didn't dare
think about that: who would they all be when-if-the cloud moved on?

She could feel herself thickening intellectually like a sidelined
athlete whose waist begins to soften.  Desultory reading wasn't going to
remove her from the scene, its weight of boredom and anxiety, but study
might.  She used to study best when she was depressed, the way some
people ate and others drank.  It meant a trip to Boston to find the
texts she needed-no one at the little Hyland Community Hospital had a
serious unto-date library-and she walked in the shadow of the
medical-center buildings, feeling her old awe at the power of
comprehension they represented, the real nobility of effort and
dedication.

That was easy to lose at home, even under the best of circumstances; the
intellectual limitations of day-in-day I ut country doctoring were
immense.  Ben probably felt that when he came down to spend the day in
the museum.

And it was a relief to be restored to anonymity again, to cross the
street and enter the medical bookstore, that hush, in search of a
monograph on blood gases in children.  She even felt the gaze of a man
in an overcoat (very urban, as far removed from her husband's country
clothes as Harrods or Burberrys from Monte's Work Clothes-"Rough Goods
for the Man Who Can Rough It"-in Hyland).  He looked at her
appreciatively, while she kept her gaze scrupulously straight, picking
up one book, riflling it, picking up another.  God only knew what his
suppositions about her might be like.  God only knew that, no matter
what they were, they were wrong.  She had to smile at the thought of
what she'd have to lay on him, as the kids would say, over a cup of
coffee.  Poor man!

She wanted to bring Judith something.  She walked up Newbury Street past
the gorgeous shops, their tasteful minimalism, but nothing had much
savor.  Worse, Judith would see the gesture for what it was.

Even so, wasn't it better to bring home something than nothing?  The
little African basket cost a lot more than it ought to, and none of it
was going back to Dakar either.  Into it she slipped a necklace made of
bananas, watermelon, and-what was that, kiwi?  Absurd.

And Judith took it from her gravely, said thanks, bore it off to her
room like a dog going to bury a bone.  Carolyn would be surprised if she
ever saw her daughter wearing it-all it would do was smell of tragedy
for her forever.  A bribe in return for a smile, and not even a smile to
show for it.  The most disquieting thing about Judith's depression was
that she knew how responsible her daughter was, how hard she usually
worked at causing her parents no pain.  She was a hider, not an
aggrandizer, this one.  She sometimes seemed to have been born
understanding what it felt like to be her own parent.  So, her mother
thought, she's beyond even that kind of control.  It's a smart girl, she
thought, who knows ruin when she sees it.

She dressed for the bail hearing the way she might for a funeral,
heedlessly.  This time Judith was coming; she seemed to be preparing
herself with extraordinary care, as if her first public appearance in
the Reiser entourage demanded it.  For a girl a little too shy for
glamour, it was an odd reaction-Carolyn thought she detected a touch of
mascara on her fair lids; she certainly smelled tea roses.  All of it
without consultation: Judith, these days, dressed and did just about
everything else behind closed doors.  Independence was Coming anyway,
but Carolyn couldn't help resenting the suddenness of her hostility; she
had little doubt Judith had not jumped but had been pushed.  Or pulled.

They went in the other direction from Concord and Manchester, westward,
in the direction of Vermont.  How many official sites could they hit in
a month, she wondered, public spaces that existed for the maintenance of
order, flying flags.  Grieves County Superior Court was a fine Victorian
building in Howe, tall, narrow, brick, which had looked ugly for a few
generations but was back in favor now, all its trim newly painted in
authentic colors.  It had a state-shaped plaque beside its door, filling
in a little history.  There was something smug about it, as if its
enthusiastic renovation might make the harsh realities of justice more
attractive as well.  At least more picturesque.

So they were bringing Jacob over in a sheriff's car, the way they'd
brought him back from Massachusetts.  Taxpayers' expense again, thanks.
All these collaborators in what used to be a private fate.  A form of
fame, she thought bitterly.  Oh, Jacob, you could have spared us such
acclaim.  The headline in yesterday's Bugler read MURDER SUSPECT T0 GET
H0WE HEARING.  Next week they would incite.what they could: L0CAL
SUSPECT BAILED; HoME.  Something to feed those who enjoyed slavering.
They had found a photograph, an informal one.

(Which cooperative friend had volunteered snapshots?) It was Jacob
laughing, handsome and unforgivably carefree.  The murderer with his
friends; Martha was probably just outside camera range.  There was no
way not to look callous if you were still alive-logical or not, this
seemed to be a picture of his current happiness.  Two reporters slouched
outside the courtroom with their cameras hanging from their hands; she
didn't recognize either of them.

But it was all emotionless.  What was she expecting, she asked herself
sternly.  Not a sensational scene.  Probably something shapely as a
movie, though, with all the dull parts cut.  Close-ups of the
principals.

Jacob's eyes, Panos Demaris's busy little body-what a strutter he was, a
rooster in gray gabardine, unglamorous but commanding, everywhere at
once, and familiar to all.  The judge, who looked as if he had
indigestion-it was right after lunch, maybe he did-and kept his eyes on
the long windows of his courtroom, which were gray with gathering rain.
He looked like a man who was worried about his golf game.  But it was
February; probably he wondered if it would turn to snow and slow him
down on his way home.

There was a lot of muttering out of earshot, up in front of the judge.

It wasn't their business, much-they had supplied the suspect; now they
had to Sit tight.  What it felt like, in fact, was a movie in the
making, before the editor got to work.  She'd seen one being made once,
in a neighboring town that had been pushed back a century by the
addition of copious sand in the streets, and a rearrangement of the
general-store porch: more barrels and rakes, the ice machine gone,
petunias everywhere.  Much ado about less than nothing: Stasis.
Paralysis, nearly, while a hundred assistants ran around with clipboards
and nothing happened for the cameras.  Days had vanished before they got
their takes.  Endless, repetitive, wearying, with no climaxes; no hint,
even, of what it was all about.

Judith sat sullenly and picked at a hangnail.  Ben was somewhere else;
he hummed under his breath (which aggravated her almost as much as the
clipping of his nails with that little silver gizmo-she plotted divorce
whenever she heard him at that.  "Bite them!" she'd whisper to herself,
knowing how irrational she'd seem if she ever brought her disgust out in
the open).  Now he sat and hummed as if he were happy.

The judge spoke suddenly, having said very little to anyone but the men
who'd huddled at the bench.  He made it sound routine: the seriousness
of the crime, the nature of, the dangers of.  Understood.

A hundred thousand, just like that.  The request-the order-seemed to
come out of nowhere.  Not that they weren't prepared for it, only that
the purpose for it all had faded.  They were going to ransom him for a
bank check delivered by hand to the clerk's office downstairs, for a
hundred thousand dollars.  Carolyn forced herself to close her eyes and
remember the blue-brown-purple of the girl's concave temple, her hair
stiff in a hardened glue of blood, and the tisSues of her skull.  She
saw Tom McAnally roll her socks down over her blue-white ankles, the
skin mottled with cold.  All right, she said to herself.  It felt
sordid, like masturbation, she was ashamed of it, having to stimulate
herself to imagine the cruelest part, to remember what and why and to
say "Okay, Ben.  Do it," because he was the one with the check in his
pocket.  "Let's go." She said it, though, and rose to her feet.  A
hundred thousand, and all in one lump, was cheap for the breath of
somebody's daughter.

None of them talked to the reporters, who raised their cameras and took
those heartless courthouse-steps photographs the papers are always full
of, the kind that make either friends or antagonists of those who
confront them over their breakfast coffee.  Unfriendly, that family,
they would say.  See, they won't even look at us.

Jacob sat beside his sister all the way home, exactly as he'd done all
his boyhood, when he could fill endless hours giggling, making the
occasional outcry, negotiating over territory, reading comics silently
or aloud.  The time, remember, Jacob, on a winding road, when Judith
vomited all over you as you slept?  She didn't ask him if he remembered.

The frequency of his trips in the backseat had dwindled to just about
nothing now that he could drive-where did they drive to that he wanted
to go without coercion?

Carolyn could see how awkward Judith felt getting in beside him.

He lurched through the door and sat down heavily and stared straight
ahead.  She went around quietly to the other side and got in rather more
demurely than usual.  Carolyn tried to imagine what all this felt like
to him but his silence-not surly but absent-accomplished what he must
have wanted it to: it made him nearly unrecognizable.  Unclaimable.  She
couldn't get a handhold.  Such self-removal, all his softness and
vulnerability effaced along with the particulars of his personality. And
it threw them all off.  There was nothing they could say to each other
that did not sound forced.  He was like the twisted ankle, she thought,
that pulled the entire body into misalignment.  The trip from Howe took
half an hour; Ben finally turned on the radio to cut the uncustomary
silence.  It made her heartsick that nobody argued about what kind of
music to listen to.

She closed her eyes as they sped east.  The rain that had worried the
judge was finally falling but the air was warm and it did nothing worse
than blacken the highway and cause the tires to sizzle.  "Skunk!"

Judith called out and wrinkled her nose.  Once that would have brought
an instant echo from her brother, who could never resist it-he'd hit her
in the arm and shout "Double skunk!" back at her and they'd mock each
other until long after the smell of the dead skunk subsided.  Carolyn
could see from Ben's eyes that he was high on the excitement of the
trip.  They seemed to dart like the pupils in REM sleep, registering
everything fast, a little dance of ConSciousneSs there on the inside of
the windshield.  Occasionally he'd do some of that tuneless humming.

She wondered finally, as they drove into the center of town and then out
of it again, if anybody had seen them, had seen his, Jacob's, head
sticking up unashamed there in the back of the car.  A homecoming.

It wasn't late and the drive had not been particularly arduous, but his
weight had exhausted them.  His absence was heavy, torpid,
aggressive-hauling him home was something like shouldering a feed sack.
They put the sack down in the middle of the kitchen floor, where it
stood refusing to make a move or acknowledge any recognition.  "You can
do whatever the hell you want to with your catatonic self," Ben said in
a voice nearly inaudible with restrained fury, "but don't even think of
opening that front door."

The rhythm of such exchanges demanded that Jacob counter, "What if I
do?" But he said nothing, only stood looking as if he hadn't heard.

Ben, perhaps in gratitude, denied himself his rhetorical "Do you
understand?" Carolyn felt like applauding his restraint.

She was overwhelmed with the futility of standing up on her two feet.
"I'm going to lie down for a few minutes," she said dimly.  "Jacob, are
you hungry?" She looked willing to cook him a meal.  "Take your coat
off." She arranged a smile.  "Stay awhile."

Judith, foraging in the refrigerator, emerged with a small fluted cup of
chocolate pudding, plucked the whipped-cream can from the door and
ostentatiously circled it over the surface till she had spun a peak that
glistened like shaving cream.  Good girl, Carolyn thought.  But her
brother gave no sign of noticing.  "My God," Judith said bravely.

"He'll even pass up chocolate!" She breathed out a long sigh of ordinary
exasperation, turned her back smartly like a marcher, and left the room.

Both of them took off their shoes and got under the quilt.  They were
careful not to touch.

The bed took her in, hard below, soft above, the quilt like a light warm
body pressed against hers.  "God, are we going to get wrinKled."

"You going somewhere?" Ben closed his eyes.  "All right.  Is he mad?

Angry, I mean?  Is he scared?  I just wish I-just-got it."

"He's punishing us.  I don't even know what I mean, but I feel it.

He's-"

"He's sending death rays," Ben said.  "Well, maybe this is what it
takes."

"What takes?"

Ben turned on his side, away from her.  "Living with what he's done." He
sounded half asleep, he yawned as if he were comfortably lying down for
a nap.  How far they had come since that first night when it had all
broken on them.  They were accommodating its impossibility, like a
chronic life-threatening illness.  "Being who he is."

"Or keeping it out," she protested.  But even as she said it she thought
vaguely, Too abstract, too textbooky.  Too neat.  That's the way
strangers think, not parents.  But she didn't know how parents thought,
generic parents.  Pale late-afternoon light made emphatic squares high
on the wall.  She, too, was washing out in a wave that obliterated the
horizon and turned her over and over and pulled her down.  On Wednesday
when the Bugler came out they'd be facing the camera with the long dark
shutters of the courthouse looming behind them.  People would look at
them and shake their heads at the way they masqueraded as an ordinary
family.

In the kitchen Jacob, in his black parka scored with red and yellow
stripes, was facing the broom closet, shivering so violently he put his
arms around himself and held tight.

They woke a few hours later, the heavy weight gone as if they'd only
suffered jet lag.  Jacob was watching television, his jacket still
ziPped.  Carolyn brought a bowl of potato soup into the den and set it
in front of him on the little table.  The room was dark except for the
box of high-colored figures who ran and stopped and stood facing each
other around a wooden bar so highly polished it gave off stars of light.

The laugh track swelled and diminished like a wave creSting and breaking
against a beach.  Cheers.

How odd, she thought: the old blue light was gone, the unearthly glow
that had risen in the days of black-and-white, filling every window with
its phosphorescence as you walked down the street, peeking in.

She put the spoon down beside the soup bowl.  Her son's face was pink in
the rainbow light.  He was focused on an argument between a very tall
woman and two men, one in a sweat suit, one in a raincoat -she was
disconcerted by how hard he was concentrating, as if she'd caught him in
an act he had claimed he could no longer perform.  His attention was
quite intact, thank you.

Alongside her anger, she felt a rising wave of desperation: she was
going to die-she thought, literally die-of claustrophobia.  There was no
world anymore.  He was all she was doomed to think about-would it be for
months?  For years, more likely.  This fine face, the gentle dark curve
of eyebrow, the firm and perfect nose, the hardening contours that were
once So soft, she Was going to be walled in with it, unresponsive,
distant, unacknowledging.  She had patients whose parents were similarly
doomed-it was unspeakable to watch them see their child dwindle toward
death or master pain or overcome paralysis.

Maybe it was worse, someone else could Say.  But, worse or better,
wasn't this different?  His body had not overcome him in one of those
genetic mishaps or dire accidents of matter; he had taken his fate, her
fate-the fate of that poor dear girl-and twisted it like someone
mutilating iron bars.  ("Oh, Mom," she could hear him taunt, "what makes
her 'dear' all ofa sudden?") He had vehemently deformed them, then
crawled through head-first, only it was a cage he'd crept into, not out
of.  And they all had to follow.

"You don't have to pretend not to be hungry," she said to him, trying
for some kind of warmth.  "You're going to have to give some signs of
life-eat, go to the bathroom.  Whatever.  Sleep." He didn't take his
eyes off the screen.  The California Raisins were leering and dancing in
shades, to a funky beat.  She was tempted to turn it off to see if, in
his effrontery, his shamelessness, he would object.  "Don't worry, we
won't mistake them for signs of communication."

She was an impatient woman-her father had always told her that was what
naturally came of being smart: no time for fools, for repetitiveness,
for the imprecise or the sentimental.  He always made it seem like the
best way to be.  (That her sister, Nina, was a vague and sentimental
fool was the other, the implied, half of the message.  Only in the last
few years had Carolyn begun to realize she herself had been the
bearer-innocent at first, then maybe all too willing-of that caustic
opinion.  At the moment Nina wasn't speaking to her, or, as far as she
knew, to anyone else much either.) Now, duly impatient, she wanted to
fast-forwird.  Skip the details, bring them to the denouement.  The
process ought to have interested her but didn't.  What haopens?  was all
she wanted to know.  Somewhere she had read, "Our winter afternoons have
been known at times to last a hundred years." She felt as if they might
be entering year 2.

A dinner party.  Imagine: the mother of the accused entertains with a
duck confit, game hens with persimmon , arugula salad, and lemon ice.
They would put her in jail for such an obscenity.

The mother of the accused goes shopoing, find: a Ralph Lauren at $19.
99.

She is lynched in her own front yard.

It is winter; she cannot garden.  She cannot ride or hike.  The victims
get the attention, and the "perpetrators." But she had never thought
about the forfeit of ordinary life for-what?  fellow travelers?

She remembered her friend Carla, who said, in the middle of her
chemotherapy, "I used to wish I'd have time for all these books.  Watch
out what you wish for-by the time you get it, you'll be too nauseous to
enjoy it."

When she was last heard from, Nina was in Montana being dwarfed by the
space, the scenery.  (The space in her head, Carolyn had thought
harshly, had finally met its match.  Then she repented thinking so
ungenerously.  But she'd thought it and it stuck.)  "It's great out here
because you're expected to be insignificant.  No one looms very large
and every man-made creation looks pathetic.  The houses look like
glued-together toothpicks." It was such a good defense Carolyn imag,ned
colonies of the self-hating and insecure huddled up in the long blue
shadows of the mountains, where nothing mattered.  (Hunters and
homesteaders didn't lack confidence, though.  Maybe there were two
populations.) Nina called late in the evening.  It was strange.  She
had, unpredictably, been speaking to their parents; every now and then
some mysterious impulse forced or invited her, it was hard to know
which, to call them.  "How is he, Car?" she asked flatly, either sedated
or feeling coerced.  Well, she wasn't gloating, anyway.

Carolyn swallowed what filled her throat like blood.  "Bailed.  We just
brought him home and we're just-here.  Nobody really knows yet.  But he
won't talk to us, Nina.  I don't have the vaguest idea how he is."

Nina laughed.  She had a husky voice, a voice that had been strafed by
chemicals and smoke, endlessly, and repaired by silence.  She knew this
ploy.  "Oh ho, Car, I'll bet that's one you really can't handle!" It
made her merry; if there was a special skill entailed by
self-annihilation, she was a past master.  "Hey, put him on.  I want to
talk to him."

She tried to imagine Nina, sitting in a little wooden house,
perhaps-she'd never rent a trailer, though she'd said there were a lot
of them out there, nestled in the capacious arms of the foothills.  It
would be one of the ugly excrescences she had described in the
ostentatious landscape, like a Popsicle construction in danger of
flattening by falling rocks.  "Story of my life," she would say if you
pushed her.

"What's going on out there, Nina?  Are you potting?"

"Potting or potted, sister dear?  I don't know what I'm doing, exactly.

A lot of meditation.  Yoga.  I'm learning some Blackfoot medicine, and a
little Crow.  It's okay.  Though a lot you care."

"Oh please, Neen.  Did you call to remind me of our first fifteen years?
Do I really need that right now?"

Nina sighed.  "Sorry.  No, I distinctly did not." She sounded sincere.

"I didn't-every time I think I've stopped being angry about-everything-I
relax and forget myself.  look, is the kid there?  I want to speak to
him."

What the hell, Carolyn thought.  She picked up the extension in the room
where Jacob was sitting tranced, brought it to him, and said, "Your Aunt
Nina.  She's calling you from outer space." She forced the phone at him;
by reflex, he received it.  Back in the kitchen, the receiver lay where
she'd put it down, in front of the row of cookbooks.  She took it from
the counter with great delicacy and put it to her ear.

"Hey, minx," she heard her sister saying.  "Seen any good flicks I need
to know about?"

"An old one," Jacob said, his voice not even rusty.  "Did you ever hear
of this thing, Casablanca?  I think it's real famous."

Nina laughed softly.  "I've heard of it.  I've even seen it ten or
fifteen times.  You liked it?"

"Mmm.  Yeah, it was better than all the noise they're putting out now.
It was, like-it felt like history.  But it was funny, too."

"I always knew you had good taste.  Have any new books for our list?"
They had a record of unlikely all-time Bests that went back to when he
was very little, books on how to make rockets and ice-cream sundaes,
books about sled dogs and maharajas.

He hesitated.  "No.  I've been-like-busy."

Nina grunted acquiescence.  "I heard." She waited.

"What did you hear?"

She sighed, very long and hard.  "Heard you may have done something you
can't take back."

The pauses were lengthening.  "Right."

Judith was standing in the kitchen door watching her.  Embarrassed,
Carolyn turned away.  On the wall were photographs of Judith and Jacob
deep in the middle of their childhoods, smiling when they weren't
eating.  In one, Jacob was flying through the air with his feet tucked
under him-he was kneeling in space!  -above sunstruck water.

His mouth was open on a shout of joy.

"What do you think about it, Jake?" Nina could talk as delicately as
tweezers moved.

"What do I think?  I think I might not come out of this alive."

"Meaning-" Another impossible pause.  "Meaning they'll get me or I'll
get myself.

Either one."

"Jacob."

"Mmm-"

"Jacob, you old minx.  Don't help them out, please.  Don't be cruel to
yourself." Her words were tightening, coiling up with urgency.  If you
need punishing, let them do it to you, they'll be only too glad to.

Don't do it to yourself.  You hear me?"

His voice was dwindling, he sounded as if he were being bawled out, not
encouraged; the air on the line was thick with the tears he was
fighting.  "Yeah.  I hear."

She told him his parents had her phone number if he needed it.  She told
him a funny story about a sheep that had gotten its muzzle frozen to her
doorstep and how she had eased him free with her steaming tea kettle and
made a friend who came inside now and slept, sometimes, beside her bed
like a dog.  "It's not a smell you'd really want to get to know, but he
gives off a lot of warmth these days." She told him the mountains looked
like painted backdrops for the kind of movies they don't make anymore,
and the Indians drove a hundred miles from one town to the next, their
engines steaming.  She told him she only had electricity about half the
time.  "I wish you could see it out here," she said.

He gave a little snort for the absurdity of the wish.  "Me too."

"I love you, fella," she said huskily, as if that were just another
story.  You are my favoritest boy of all time."

Carolyn heard her end of the connection click off.

Judith stood with her hands on her hips, the seal of her negative
judgment.  "Would you do that to me, too?  God.

Carolyn laughed without pleasure.  Her chest was quivering with tension.
"Oh, Judith, don't be such a purist.  There are times-"

"You and Daddy always tell us there are no exceptions: you don't steal,
you don't cheat, and you don't peek!  Or eavesdrop."

"Keep your voice down," she whispered.  "Shhh .  .  ." She wanted Judith
to go away so she could think about what she'd heard.  Or not heard. The
love in it, the disorder.  He had admitted nothing.  Only tlie danger he
was in, not a word about guilt or circumstances.  Leave it to Nina to
manage to have the chance to open him up a little and to blow it on
feelings.

As would Ben, perhaps.  He would soothe rather than challenge.

Either that, she realized with some surprise, or he'd annihilate him.

There it was: either he'd take his son in his arms and stroke his terror
away or he'd shout down the rafters and threaten mayhem.  That was what
you called being a loose cannon.

"I feel like telling Jacob!" Judith announced.  "I think I will.  I'll
tell him, 'You're not the only criminal here!'" She must have been
remembering how Jacob had been grounded once for listening to her phone
conversation and then making fun of the nonsense he'd heard, she and
Celeste dreaming about love, boys, haircuts.  Justice was still an
absolute for her.

Nina, Nina, Nina.  Not a solid bone in her body, gone to the fat of
self-contempt, and not a solid challenging thought in her head.  Had she
done that on purpose, generously concerned for how her nePhew must be
suffering, or did she just lose it, let it go by, the chance to push a
little, find out the truth?  Reality was a bad word to Nina.  It was
never good news, loaded rather with ill will and hard adjustments; it
was packed with high-explosive facts that promised death to the status
quo.

Once, when their mother fell on the ice and they were very young-eight,
maybe, and six, or nine and seven-trailing her home from the store on a
snowy day, her arms full of heavy paper bags, and her legs had leaped
out from under her and she'd hit the sidewalk hard, Carolyn had insisted
on knowing exactly what hurt.  Here, her back?  Or only her seat, this
bone at the end of her tail?  She had just learned in school that
sometimes people shouldn't move when they've been hurt, and she was
trying it out, grateful to have some way to help, and she had poked and
prodded for the details.  Nina, making little sounds like a crying
gull-or maybe they were encouragements, you couldn't tell-whipped off
her coat to cover her mother up, right to the chin.  Even though she'd
left her mittens home, she'd pounded the snow into a sumptuous mound and
packed it under her mother's head for a pillow, and stroked her face
while she arranged her on it.

It had never occurred to Carolyn that her sister might be a better
person than she was.  For all her social ineptness, and her incapacity
for joy, perhaps she was, profoundly, more decent, more loving.  We
should have been a single girl, she thought.  Or a single woman.  We
would have been perfect, a blend of hard and soft, prod and soothe.

Cure and nurture.

They would have been a hell of a lot less lonely, both of them, for
sure.

"Jake," she said from his doorway the next afternoon, a whisper.  "I
know you don't want to talk much but-please!  Did you go anywhere,
really?" She stood on one foot and then the other.  "Just-like in
twenty-five words or less?  Please?"

He had been sitting with his back turned to his desk.  He was looking at
his room as if he had never seen it before, like someone judging a
stranger's life by his surroundings, undecided what he thought of him.

He sighed and closed his eyes.  "Sure I went," he said quietly.  "Every
day I got up and went out to Logan-" That was the airport, way at the
end of the T line.  "I had a bunch of these postcards, you know?

Like with all these cities on them.  I got them at this crazy store?
And I looked around and found a flight that was going where I wanted to
go, and then I found someone who wouldn't mind mailing a card for me
when they got there."

Judith stared.  His eyes were still closed and he smiled, though not at
her.

"And after I gave it to-whoever-nobody ever turned me down -I sat in one
of those seats there in the waiting area, you know, near the ticket
counter.  Excuse me, podium, they like to call it podium, like, the most
pretentious thing so you can't figure out what they're talking about.
And I closed my eyes like this.  And I went with them.

I got there quicker.  And cheaper.  St.  louis and Albuquerque.  See,
you can t fly direct to Santa Fe on a big plane, you've got to go to
Albuquerque.  I went to all of them." She wondered if the same slow
tears squeezed out of his eyes when he sat in the airport.  He'd have
been embarrassed.  "But you won't tell, will you?  Nobody would
understand."

"Mm-mmmh, I won't," she promised.  "I understand, though.  I hope you
had a good time." She didn't like pitying Jacob, it didn't feel normal.
He talked about sentimental people as if they were ugly.  She wished she
could put her arms around him, but he'd never forgive her.  She waited
for a threat but he just turned hiS back on her and, this time, judged
the view from his dusty window, dirty snow down in the driveway, stamped
a hundred times by tire tread, and the distant hills turning purple with
cold.

Jacob once said that we made a fetish out of the dinner table.  I never
really thought much about it, I assumed that everybody everywhere got
together once a day-probably Bedouins in the desert did it, and
Ethiopians, who dipped that spongy bread into a single dish.  It wasn't
a self-conscious move to keep the family together, it was only natural:
love, curiosity and concern for each other's day, plus the sheer need to
eat-it was half a dozen things, all of them benign.  But no, he said.

He had a lot of friends who ate on the run.  Even here, where big-city
dissolution hadn't visibly set in, one-parent families, second-shift
families.  Families that didn't like each other.  It was dazzling, the
little window he opened on varieties of family habit.  And he'd been
studying some sociology in school, or maybe it was psychology. Whatever,
it gave us a name-we were the nuclear family, and maybe we took too much
for granted.  Judith was alarmed.  (This was a few years ago.) What, she
wanted to know, did our family have to do with the atom bomb?  We
laughed, but she was right-didn't it make us sound dangerous, like
something about to detonate?

Now, though.  All of us arrived at the table by sheer force of
expectation, at six o'clock.  Jacob's first night home, I'd made
Szechuan chicken, fried rice, incredibly overpriced out-of-season snow
peas.

(Every trip to the supermarket cost me a little boiled blood.  Some
people were matter I ffact and said hello; others cut me, turned their
baskets away.  Even the polite ones, though, didn't want to talk-So how
are things?" was too ridiculous-and neither did I.  But we had to eat,
so I ran the gauntlet with an expressionless face.

Then again, last time, on my way home with the groceries, I stopped for
gas-it's all full-service in this town, we need the jobs-and the kid who
filled my tank, tall as a basketball player but a little too hunched,
too slow, too heavy-boned, leaned in and said, "Hey, say hi toJake for
me.  Tell him Freddy."

"Okay, Freddy," I said, So pleased I was embarrassed.  He was as neutral
as the windshield he was wetting down.  "Anything else?"

"No, hi's good enough." He turned the squeegee over.  "From Freddy.")
"I'll bet they didn't serve this at the-at Deer Creek," Carolyn went at
him doggedly.  That was what they called the youth facility, named, like
a suburban street, by dreamers.

He smiled faintly and forked it up.  Let me assume gratitude is an
emotion too deep for words.  He never touched Carolyn's soup that first
night, but now he was eating, at least, as if they'd been starving him.
His cheeks were drawn, his color terrible, but I hadn't attributed it to
bad nutrition; there were enough reasons to look less than your best in
the lockup.

The rest of us chattered about this and that.  Judith told us they were
casting Working; there were no appropriate parts for her; she thought
she might work backstage, on lights or props.  We were like a stereo
set, an odd one, three speakers set up with enormous distance between
them.  Each voice came from somewhere else.  And in the middle sat the
Space.

Carolyn tried to address it more or less directly.  "What were you
eating, Jake?  At Deer Creek."

He shrugged.  "You know," he said into his fork.  "The usual." His first
words.

"The usual.  Well, I've never had a meal in a place like that, so what's
the usual'?"

He only shook his head as if the answer was too complex for his
vocabulary.

I had to restrain myself-had to and did.  So Judith leaped in again and
tried to plug the hole.  I was grateful to her, but it didn't solve the
problem.

A deus ex machina did.  We are not abandoned yet, I thought.  There are
still unfilled spaces for luck in the world, even if they are set in
motion by sheer nastiness.

What happened was, the phone rang.  We had, these days, no small
quantity of ill-wishers who felt duty-bound to inform us that our son
should be in a high-security prison awaiting his moment in the chair.

We're the folks who had just yesterday received in our mailbox the
subtle message that JEWS BLEED c I I jnBE I !, illustrated by a
flattened stick figure, drops of blood flying off in all directions, the
way children draw the rays of the sun.  The first few times, as Carolyn
had warned me, they really catch you in the solar plexus.  But you can't
go on letting yourself be injured, and so you don't.  Callous or not,
you just work out a routine and you play it like a tape.  There's no
"I-thou" with your harassers (who only think they're God), and I'd given
up feeling guilty over it.

This gloater was a thin-voiced old man who took a while to get to it but
finally advocated stoning.  I had long thought that if this could only
be a laughing matter, we d have plenty to practice on.  "Yessir, I see,"
I said with unforced calm.  "That's very biblical.  And you'd cast the
first one, I take it?" Consternation on the wire.  This was, I suppose,
like foiling an exhibitionist by yawning at the show of his most
precious possessions.  5o he said it again, only louder, and added that
it figured that my boy would go wrong, I was such a wise guy.

Therefore, I closed with my usual.  "Now I want you to listen
carefully." I liked to say that confidentially, so he'd lean in and
concentrate on a message just for him.  "I want you to know, you good
American, that my son is innocent.  Until he is found guilty by a court
of law, he is no more guilty than you are.  And no one has done that
yet.  No, no," I said over his complaints.  "You are going to have to
live with that fact for a long time, and maybe even longer than that,
because he is still, this minute, a free young man, legally here on
bond, against whom nothing has been proven.  I didn't pause to hear his
reaction (which would undoubtedly have been something along the lines of
"But you and I know").  I hung up and sat down again.  My face still
flushed with each performance.

/udith applauded.  "Yay, Daddy, you are so cool!"

But jacob was looking at me hard.  "Do you believe that?"

His voice broke over me like a memory.  "What do you mean?  Do I believe
everyone's innocent until proven guilty?  Unless, I should say.  Of
course I believe that.  Our system"1 don't mean our system.  I mean,
about me.  Do you believe I'm not guilty?"

Ah, that was another story, wasn't it?  I chewed my chicken very
deliberately, I took a sip of water.  "lacob," I said, "I don't know.
Now that you're here, we can talk about that.  We've got plenty of
time." I wanted to tell him what I'd done for him, guilty or not.  I
don't mean for credit, or to make him love me.  I mean, so that he would
feel safe.

Would relax a little and trust us.  "It doesn't matter, I told him
instead-I meant it as a rough translation.  "Whatever the truth is,
we're standing here with you.  Believe me, it doesn't matter."

"Not that.  I don't mean that.  That's all sentimental bullshit.  I
mean"Hey," Carolyn said.  "Hey, not so fast.  Sentimental bullshit?"

"Oh, everybody's parents say stuff like that.  That isn't-"

"Do they," she said coolly, and I was grateful.  "Do they, indeed.

And they hide the murder weapon and destroy some of the evidence?

Do they really?  You know that for a fact?" Her face was a dangerous
white mottled with color as bright as welts.

He looked at both of us, one to the other and back again, as if to ask
each of us if this was a joke.  Honest to God, he really didn't get it.
"What 'murder weapon'?" Said not with wonder, let alone gratitude, but
with contempt, as if we were his accusers.

It was undignified to claim credit for what we-what I-had done.

It was offensive to cite the parents of his friend Frodo, and God knows
how many of the rest of his friends as well, who had made clear they
would not so automatically "say stuff like that." This was no
competition.  So I asked him to tell us what had happened.  As he spoke,
I reminded myself that I'd despaired of ever hearing his voice again.

Hearing it, I didn't have to like what it said.  That was the point,
wasn't it?  This was our problem, not only his, and we would have to
solve it together.  That was both what caused and what came of those
endless evening meals at this table that he liked to mock, the leisurely
accounts, the transfer of information, the patient accretion of a
thousand daily incidents of circumstance and character.  The bad old
Nuclear Family all in a huddle of particles around its nucleus, which
was-I didn't I know what.  Once upon a time it might automatically have
been the Father-/acob's patriarch.  But it surely was not so these days,
nor did I want it to be.

In the middle of the table, the chicken glistened slick in its sauce.

The vegetables around it were bright as ornaments.  I had prepared the
dinner as a sign of hope, to loosen tongues and remind us of other days.
But we didn't have to recognize that for it to work on us.  We only had
to eat and feel reassured.

"How am I supposed to sit here over this chicken and talk about killing
somebody?" He looked down at the hodgepodge on his plate, the brown and
green and the red of the pepper, and back up at us where we sat still,
afraid to utter a syllable.  "If I'm going to be here with you"You
wouldn't talk to us when you were in Cambridge.  You wouldn't talk at
Deer Creek.  You wouldn't talk anytime.  God only knows what that was
all about.  What are-how are we supposed to know what to think, let
alone do?" This was me at my most rational.

"Really, what would you have us do to help you?"

He looked cornered.  But I saw his point: maybe this ordinary scene,
this familiar family picture we had assembled as if nothing had changed,
just made it all the more impossible.  Did we need a cemetery at
midnight, though, like some spooky gothic romance?  Did we need the fogs
of goddamn Transylvania?

I repeated myself carefully.  "What would you have us do to help you if
you won't-" I wanted to say surrender.  "Stop running, ]acob," I pleaded
instead.  "You're home now.  Can't you finally stop running?"

His voice was almost unrecognizably quiet.  "If I tell you what
happened-this wasn't me.  It wasn't me, all right?" He pushed his plate
away.  Had the grace, I thought unkindly, to turn away from it.  The
possibilities were gone: flight, lying, silence, all of them were old,
as he might put it.  They dead-ended here.  Home or trapped, I didn't
know which he felt.  I didn't try to guess for him anymore.

"Okay.  If I can." He closed his eyes and kept them closed a long time.
Then he opened them but did not look at us.  "We were-we were, like-we
hung out together a lot this year.  I know you didn't even know that.  I
didn't-it didn't seem like it was something you ought to know.  You
wouldn't have liked to know.  Don't ask me why, that seems stupid now,
but it didn't then.  And it doesn't matter, I don't think.  It wouldn't
have changed anything anyway.

Judith put her elbows on the table and propped her head on her open
hands.  She looked like a student on the first day of school, prepared
for anything that came her way.  And my son went on talking.

His face was pale when he began, but it reddened as he spoke, until, by
the end, I was afraid for him.  Did teenagers have strokes?  Could a
seventeen-year-old agitate himself into a broken blood vessel?

He told us they'd had a cabin they went to after school, many many
times.  It was a hunting camp, long disused, that had belonged to
Martha's uncle, Harry Pipes, back off a logging road that came down near
the junction of Poor Farm and Skittles Roads.  "We'd leave the car and
walk in when it was muddy or snowy.  Otherwise, you could ride.  The
cabin didn't have much in it-a couple of pots and pans and lousy old
dishes, a rusty stove.  A dart board we used.  A couch." I'll bet.  "All
of it was ratty, but it didn't matter, we could get away from everybody
there, it was-like-enough." I passed no judgments.  I saw Theda looking
down on me from behind her hedge of dark hair, I saw our young unused
bodies fitted together tight, and I thought, All right, so what?  Good,
in fact.  Carolyn, the Virgin Queen, her eyes dark with reproach-or
maybe simple sadness, let me not presume-did not look quite so
forgiving.  But that's another story.

On that day-when he called it that day his eyes opened wide as if he'd
been slapped-they'd had a terrible argument.  She had been going after
him from the minute he'd picked her up at the ice I ream shop, at
Jacey's, very disdainful, clearly picking a fight.  "So when we got to
the cabin I tried to get her to tell me what was wrong and she finally
told me, she said, 'You're not going to like this, but'-and it turns out
she's pregnant.  And I'm not who she's mad at really, she's mad at
everyone and everything.  God especially, for letting this had pen.  She
was heavy into God sometimes, especially when she needed anything.  I
used to tell her God was her sugar daddy." He gave a snort of laughter.
"Which, of course, she didn't like."

I nodded.  "We knew that, Jacob.  That she was pregnant.  They-found it
out.  You know." I couldn't get myself to say the word autoory, as if it
might shock him.

"Okay.  But it's more complicated, see.  God, it's a fucking soap opera.
He looked at Carolyn and Judith, who were shifting in their seats.
"Excuse me.  I wanted to say we've got more important things to worry
about here than harsh language.

The complicated part was that she didn't think the baby was his.

"Just like As the World Turns." And that was when things really got
nasty.  She wouldn't say whose it might be, or how, let alone why.

"Only, she had obviously been-you know.  Getting around.  And I never
had a clue." He laughed at the delicacy of his impulse toward euphemism;
he was embarrassed.  "She figured it wasn't ours because we were"-he
glanced very quickly at Judith, as if maybe she shouldn't be hearing
these details; but he went on-"we were always pretty careful.  I really
wanted to be .  .  .  I was trying to be responsible, you know?  I
didn't think there was anything wrong with what we were doing, but I
didn't want her getting in any trouble like that." At this, the memory,
I guess, of his concern-it must have been the tenderness of his care
about her-he was swamped with tears.  He got up and walked around the
room slowly, shaking his head as if, rough enough with it, he could
clear it of emotion.

"So then, I don't know," he said when he came back to us, but he didn't
sit down again, he stood and paced.  "Then, I guess she's trying to make
the break, you know, she starts insulting me and saying all kinds of-it
was pretty stupid, it was, like, you're no good anyway, now I can tell
you I never really liked you, that kind of thing.  She says, like, you
think you're so terrific and your parents are such big deals, you and
that house with that lawn.  The lawn really freaked her out, she always
talked about it.  I'd say, God, all that lawn is is a pain in the ass if
you want to know, I have to mow it, but it was, like, you'd think it was
a goddamn estate here or something with a drawbridge."

He cleared his throat.  This was more talking than most boys his age do
in a year.  'And then, she's getting all wound up, she even blames me
for, like, taking care with her.  For using-only a wimp would, you know,
think ahead like that, and-I don't know, it was all too-sort of, too
controlled for her.  You know what I mean?  She made it seem like she
only respected somebody who would-like, just force her.  So I said, 'Are
you looking for a caveman, you want some guy to yank you around by your
hair?  You like the idea some hairy ape knocks you up and doesn't even
give a damn what he's doing?" And she goes, like, 'Yes.  Yes, that's
what I want, and that's sure not you." Which ought to make me proud, I
suppose, but, boy, not then.

It made me feel like a turd right then." He rubbed his whole face hard
with his open hand.  "And, I mean, I don't even know if I beheve all
this shit.  I mean, excuse me, this, like-anger.  I kept feeling like
she was very confused and just raging around at everybody, and she was
trying to blame me for whatever part she could sort of pin on me, you
know.  Something my fault.  So then-so then-" This he couldn't say.  He
stood for a while with his lips tightly closed.  "She did some stuff
that was-not so nice.  To, like, provoke me.  To get me to be like that,
you know, that wild man." This was when his face began to redden so
terribly I was afraid for him.  He was teary and short of breath but,
worse, he was redder than he'd been after the triathlon we ran in last
year.  "I don't want to talk about it, I don't-just-I couldn't be that.
I couldn't do anything she wanted me to do.  And I was-" He breathed out
very hard.

"Ashamed?" I prompted.

"Ashamed and angry and disgusted and-like, so many different things I
couldn't see straight.  So I said, Let's go, that's all, this is the end
of it, I'll take you home and you can have your baby or not have it, or
stay with your caveman or not, I don't care.  And we left."

And then and then?  We sat in silence.

"And then, I don't know, we walked out to the road real far apart and
got in the car, and just around when we got over toward Tuttle's, she
says, 'Oh, Jacob, I didn't mean any of that, I'm sorry." She's crying.

She's just confused, is all.  'Pull over here,' she goes, 'I'll show you
I don't mean any of it." So I pull off-this is so stupid-we're in front
of that fence and, you know, we sit for a while and we sort of make up.
I'm still upset, because frankly I didn't like some of the things she
said, I figure deep down she must really mean them, and I know I'm
probably going to hear them again on a bad day.  But we sit there
awhile, we're like-very friendly.  And it's beginning to get dark by
now.  So when I start up the car again we're stuck.  We're deep in
shit."

All this, I found, was easy to picture.  It was Jacob, recognizably,
humanly Jacob, who was telling this story.  I know it's going to end
terribly but at least he's real, he's warm and pulsing with blood, and I
knew it, I knew it: he is no fiend.  Either that's clear or it's not
clear, how I could be in a state of near-euphoria because the voice
that's telling us this is no stranger's.

And then it gets terrible again.  They try a bunch of ways to get out of
the rut, but anyone knows how you just dig yourself deeper.

They rock it, she tries to back it up while he pushes, they put a mesh
screen under the wheels, nothing helps.  Finally she thinks of jacking
up the car.  He's not sure what that will do, but she says they can at
least fill in the pit they've made by now under the wheels, so they can
start again on smooth snow.  So they do that, and when they let the car
down gently it doesn't help.  Recrirninations.  "She's ragging me and
saying if I had some real shoulders I could have pushed harder.

I mean, this is so dumb it's like-I could never say this in a court,
they'd laugh at me, it's not-how could it end that way?" He kept shaking
his head.  "So I hand her the jack to put away since it didn't work, and
she calls me something choice, I don't even remember, a turkey or
something, a dweeb, some kind of a loser, I don't know, but it was,
like, one thing too many and I lost it.  I slapped her." He sighed.

"I did, I slapped her, not hard.  I just caught her on the side of her
chin.  I was so tired, and I wanted to get home and get her out of my
sight.  I called her some names I shouldn't have-you know.  Not nice.

You can guess." I could guess, shame and impatience and dishonor and
sexual humiliation too, all closing down on him like the dark that was
deepening full-speed by then.  "And when I slapped her she grabbed me
and hit me in the face, first with her hand, then, I suppose I was
trying to get her off me, we were sort of fighting-about to fight-and
she swung at me with the jack." He made a terrible sound then, as if he
was being stabbed, his flesh torn-as if the words, each one embedded in
his skin, were being removed from him by force.  "Please," he said,
"plea:e, do I have to do this?"

We sat stock-still.

"You have to do it," I said.

He went over and put his hands out to my shaman, my pile of wood in the
corner, sitting unlit and unlikely, and slid them gently over its fat
curved shoulders the way a blind person or a baby feels something it's
trying to learn by touch alone.  For solace, oh my Jacob.  To touch
something hard and true under his hands.  He stood there for a few
minutes, weeping frankly, not fighting it.  Carolyn got up and went and
stood beside him, held him around the shoulders, firm.  I realized I
hadn't heard him cry for years.  When he put that damn cap on, sign he
was a true adolescent, vain and strong and all the rest, he went too
adult to cry.  "Okay," he said at last.  "I can do it.  Okay." Carolyn
sat down.

His voice was frayed.  I could barely hear him.  "She swung and she just
missed me and I just-grabbed it, she was screaming at me and I pulled it
out of her hands and then-" He covered his face, not with his hands but
with the crook of his arm, with the gray nubbled sleeve of his sweater.
I hated to think what he was seeing in that prickly dark where he rested
his eyes.  It was a long time.  Nobody said anything.

Judith sniffled once and we sat tight.  "The thing is," he finally said,
"you say murder, you say dea"', bludeeoned to death, and it sounds
so-mysterious.  And so huge.  It sounds so-impossible to imagine.  But
it wasn't.  It wasn't something I was trying to do, it wasn't something
I thought about.  Even after I did it-I mean after it haopenedI couldn't
believe I could have hurt her like that.  No way.  Unreal.  It was like
any accident-you know, if I'd have swung and missed like she did, just a
couple of inches off, we'd be-everything would just -my biggest problem
would be, like, do I say hello when I see her in the hall at school?"

He looked at us with all the bewilderment we'd been trapped with all
these weeks, the amazement at how accident could become sickening
reality.  It made sense.  It computed.  I went to him where he stood,
his eyes huge, swimming in tears again at his unspeakable luck, and I
took him in my arms and felt him lean against me, no more resistance, no
more refusals.  "You'll be all right, Jacob," I whispered to him.  "If
you tell them exactly that-very word of it-you'll be fine." I could hear
the words in the courtroom, I could see the wonder in his own eyes, the
bewilderment that made him a victim, too.  He nodded against me, though
he didn't in fact relax the stiffness of his shoulders, the tension that
made him feel ready to flee.  (Only later did I remember the jack-how
could he ever explain its disappearance?  It was too insane: somehow or
other I'd have to convince him to lie for me!) Out of the corner of my
eye I could see Carolyn, her thin hands stretched in front of her on the
table.  Her fingers opened and closed, opened and closed, like an
ecstatic cat's.  She did that when she was troubled and thinking hard;
it seemed to sop up her unspent energy.

She looked pretty overwhelmed herself, but she was frowning.  Her face
was aloof with her own refusals, and my chest flipped over.

Ambush.  I couldn't imagine what she was thinking, but just then, no
question, I felt as one with Jacob, and frightened of my wife.  Why
would she not be satisfied?  We weren't out ofthe woods yet, I thought,
and I clung as hard as I could.  He would have to get this story heard,
however he could.  He would have to say it out in court, say it wherever
he could get a hearing.  An accident.  Bad fortune.  Anger all around,
and the terrible means at hand.

They were the only people she knew who didn't have a dishwasher.

Although in principle she believed you should never look a timesaving
device in the mouth, she liked to swirl her hands around in warm water
and think-it was a primitive satisfaction.  She filled up the sink
around the dinner dishes and felt the pleasure of plunging, all the way
to the wrists, into the heat.  Outside the kitchen window and across the
black lawn, headlights flashed through the dark and vanished, like
comets.

The trickle of doubt, a thin stream, worked slowly through her.

She dragged her fingers through the soapy spirals, invoking whatever
feelings would come, logical or not.  It wasn't that she didn't believe
his story, it seemed thoroughly plausible: not sensational, not an
account of unrecognizable passion.  Quite the contrary, it was as banal
as real life, as unexceptional, one event leading to another, a
confusion of emotions spreading outward until they stained everything.
And his dissociation from its effects she had understood: Did I do that?
How could this have happened, we were just...  we were only.  .  .  I
didn't mean .  .  .  As if he'd broken a vase.  As if he'd let the cat
out when they'd told him to keep her in.  But that was where she stuck.
You might do something accidentally, she'd seen people who had hit
children in their cars; dogs, even.  She'd seen them reduced to
near-hysteria because they'd caused harm guiltlessly.  Had broken
something irreplaceable, not even by inattention.  "She just ran out...
He suddenly popped out from between two cars.  .  .  He was chasing his
ball and it was getting dark .  .  ." Oh God, they cried, oh God,
forgive me!, the drivers no less in need of comfort than the parents.

He had mangled this girl-this woman-with whom he had shared the most
intimate acts, and words, and feelings, hours and hours of them.  He had
just, by the side of Tuttle's split-rail fence, whispered in her ear,
grazed his lips, probably, along her delicate neckbone where the short
fair hairs curled.  Then he had mauled her.  Had felt the connection of
the steel with that familiar fine blond hair, her breakable skull-and he
had fled.  Hit-and-run, she had gone to bed thinking that first night,
her movements slower and slower, pulling off her sweater, slipping off
her bra, wading as if through some heavy dreamtide toward bed.  The most
heinous cowards, she always thought when they brought the human road
kill to the ER, were the hit-and-runs, who must have looked around to be
sure they hadn't been seen, turned off their headlights if it was dark,
and crept away fast.  Hit-and-run.  It was not the same crime, the
blameless one, those others had wrought with their cars, the ones who
came shrieking in with blood in their voices, blood now, forever, on
their hands.

Road kill.  Callous word that made animals sound like prey, the daily,
expectable haul.  But the girl-she stopped still, a plate like a wide
flat stone between her hands.  Jesus, the girl.  She hadn't been hit
once, almost accidentally, the way Jacob told it.  The image crawled up
unbidden out of her memory, finally.  Oh Jesus, that mangled skull she
had seen, that was the result of some huge anger, some colossal,
unimaginable, tearing fury.  If only his aim, he had said, had been as
bad as hers.  But no.  No.  It might have happened to him, the whole
terrible scene that he didn't go looking for, but once in it, hadn't he
smashed and smashed and gone on smashing?  Self-defense?  Ah, no way.
And then he ran away.  Never called for help, never flagged down a car
or got himself to the nearest house or.  .  .  The water, going dark,
flecked with bits of that good dinner, swayed under her hands.  She was
going to be sick.

Carolyn turned away from the sink, hands dripping.  He was only a child,
terrified.  Can you call a frightened boy a coward?  And the slashing,
smashing fury, she had seen that a lot over the years around here-it was
habit with Ben.  He had trashed his sculptures when they had betrayed
him, when they refused to work.  lIe had been so angry once she watched
him put his whole arm through the composition board of his studio,
almost ecstatic; then had seen him subside, satisfied, like a man at
sex.  (And Jacob had come with a Magic Marker and drawn an
arrow-red-aimed at the spot, a long exclamation-a %#$&*!-coming out of
it.)  Once he'd made a bonfire and, though it took nearly an hour to
catch, he'd consumed the piece he'd been wrestling with, and his face
had held pure murderous rancor in it, hatred of the wood as if it had
been some accursed flesh.  He tried and failed and tried again to
throttle that rage-what would he have been capable of with a piece of
hard metal in his hands?  How many times would he have hit her?  She put
her arms around herself, stamping dark wet handprints on her opposite
sleeves like stenciled flowers, so cold, so cold beside the stove that
was too hot to come near, that gave off waves of light-bending warmth
like desert air that makes mirages on the horizon, and rocked herself.
Her son was being torn from her for good, she could feel it.  He had
torn himself once and then, the closer she came to the truth, again and
again and yet again.  Her chest was gaping where he had been attached,
if only by invisible threads, and the winter air blew in now, cold.

One night, a little stircrazy, we went down to our friends Mock and
Harlie Frazier's.  They had given up New Jersey and bought the Hyland
Inn and Tavern not so long ago, right in the middle of town, a lovely
old building with chipping paint and sagging porches that they pulled
back from the brink of ruin by a huge application of love and money. Now
that it was spick-and-span, the town had proudly reclaimed it.  Mock
found a spinning wheel for the front hall, an eighteenth I entury
secretary to tuck beside the registration desk to hold brochures for the
local craft shops, and they moved in half a dozen canopy beds with a
cloud cover of lace.

I loved sitting in the dark tavern in the great macho chairs-wood and
leather, like something medieval.  Hyland had looked like this once
without selfconsciousness.  I came down here to be a curmudgeon and ride
my hobbyhorses: In 1832, if you bought lumber of a certain
specification, you got it, you didn't share a couple of inches with the
mill.  If you ate chickens, they were clean and healthy.  There were no
motorcycles.  The long sign over the bar, genuine and mighty heavy,
painted bunches of grapes at either end, greeted us: 'lV I I l;;' I I I
I I I I I I;;' I I I I I I I I I I This was an oasis: real life went by
in the street outside while the guests borrowed the rocking chairs and
pondered life among the na tives.  It amused me to watch the men coming
out of the dining room with their hands up against their jackets,
patting down satiation, their wives flushed with a good heavy New
England meal.  (You can smell it at the door: always the fried scrod,
always the bread pudding with its tinge of sweet burned molasses.)  The
fireplace worked assiduously behind us.  In summer there'd be petunias
in boxes on the porch, and blue Iobelia, and a garden of greens to eat
from.  The place was charmed.

Mock came out from behind the bar when she saw us, and sat down at our
booth.  "So .  .  ." she said, noncommittal, turning a spoon in her
large hands.

"So," Carolyn repeated.  Mock and Harlie hadn't called or come by.

"How's the season going, Mockie?  Okay?"

She shrugged.  She's an ample woman with a little-girl blunt haircut
that makes her dark head seem small on her big body, and the long white
apron she wore, authentic-looking, made her loom even larger.

It was muslin, with lace at the bottom: Vermeer's women wore these, and
German peasants.  'Decent skiing," she said, "no artificial snow this
year," and that was all.  The room was busy, with a nice lamp glow like
something you'd kindle by hand, and a buzz of conversation all around.
If I were the proprietor I'd feel like a host giving a good, if sober,
party.  "You look like a mummer, Mock," I said.  "You look like you're
dressed for history."

She smiled without much warmth.  And we looked at each other.

That meant, I suppose, that she was thinking terrible thoughts and
suppressing them.  Not a word.  Why had we thought to come?  Comfort for
the traveler but not for the embattled local friend knee-deep in
home-grown manure?  I wanted to get up and apologize for contaminating
their sweet once-upon-a-time.

"I've got to get back to the customers, Mock said, wearily, I thought,
and began to push back from the table.  "Look-and her face was pretty
distressed, I'll give her that.  "You know we-you're our friends.  You
know.  But-' She looked over her shoulder, but if she needed moral
support her husband was nowhere in sight.  "See-I don't know if you-did
you know Mike's been working for us?  Mike Taverner?"

I was caught with my beer halfway to my mouth.  "What does he do?"
Reflex chatter.  As if it mattered.

"Oh, a lot of different things.  He's a good all-around-you know,
carpentry.  Electrical stuff.  He's-he-uh, he hasn't been drinking for a
long time now, and he's been just-super.  Super."

So, I guess, if he was super, we couldn't be.  There was not enough room
in the state of superness for all of us at the same time.  I don't think
I said that out loud, but I can't be sure.  Carolyn didn't look at Mock,
only stared across the room with her eyes narrowed.  By good luck,
nobody stared back.

"Ben," Mock said, I don't know why to me-I couldn't see my own face. She
finally rose; she seemed alarmingly tall.  "I don't like to take sides.
It's all awful, I'm sure it's been ghastly for you.  But I've seen Mike,
he's such a sweet helpless man under the sort of-I mean, you know, he
sometimes seems to swagger a little, maybe, but it's just the way he is
with us, I don't think-well, he's not too comfortable with people like
us at first, and he used to be very contemptuous about our-you know"-she
took them in with a single head movement"the clientele.  But he's gotten
to be quite indispensable, and he's-well, he's just been finished by
this, that's all.  He is ruined.  His little girl.  I understand he's
drinking again and who can blame him, so I-" I was tempted to say, "My
little boy."

But "Mock," my wife said with shaky dignity.  "I'm touched that you're
devoted to your-to Mike Taverner.  That's very feeling of you.

But I'm not sure why you have to choose up like this.  I don't quite-"

"Carolyn, don't make it hard, okay?  You might not understand, from
where you are.  I just feel you people have-you've lost less.  And you
started with more.  You know?  Of course you have to protect him, but I
hate to tell you, a lot of folks seem to feel this way too, they think-"
She cast her round blue eyes upward.  She was one of those people who
retained the looks, I suspect, of their childhoods-this was her
Exasperated Child.

"Whatever they think, they have a nerve being so sure they-"

"Carolyn," I said.  "Honey.  You don't want to do this."

She looked at me as if I'd just walked in.  Sometimes one of us seemed
to be in shock-it came suddenly, and then lifted just as fast.

Oh, its you.  And we're still here.  "You're right," she said.  "Thank
you.

I don't." Her lips went taut.

I was sloshing the beer around in my mug the way you jiggle your foot
when you're impatient; a little went over the edge, onto the wooden
table.  We stared at the splash as if it was a public indiscretion.
Mock reached down, not with a napkin but with the hem of her perfectly
white apron, the lace edge, sighing, and dabbed it dry.

My workshop stank.  Closed-in air, sour ashes, something dead in the
wall like wet cardboard, niggling, rancid.  If I died suddenly, this was
how it would be caught looking, slipshod, tools abandoned on the
workbench, since I'm not one of those housekeepers who tenderly wipe and
hang everything up.  My figures hulked around like orphans, only half
alive out in this fetid air.  Only I knew what they needed to be
finished.

All the times I've come out here as urgent as a lover climbing to his
mistress's bed .  .  .  I've never known why artists have reputations
for sitting in cafes, drinking and gabbing, when we're all work
obsessives.

Even I, who seem to hang with people more than many, who came to this
glorious green Hyland half for aloneness and half for community-even I
had to make myself stop work to go to bed some-times, so I could get up
at a decent hour to feed my kids.

One misstep and he'd be eating jail food forever.  Gluey eggs, gray
French toast.  Enough to make my gorge rise.  We did not have him for
that.  We did not raise him to go off into captivity at the height of
his strength with his wits intact and his body barely used.  I could get
very sentimental at every pleasure he'd never have, every country he'd
never visit-no Seine, no Prado, no Trevi Fountain.

There was forgiveness, even in the courts, for passion.  There was a
little leeway, so I was instructed, for excess, bad judgment,
uncontrollable instinct.  But could we trust it, the jury of judges?
Would they throw a good life after a wasted one?  I saw that key chain
of Jacob's, with Martha's bikini top flapping, doing a coy turn,
acquiescent, provocative.  So what, though?  He was a man with a club,
in the end, that's what the jury would see.  Imagine this man, then,
bashing her into that good night because she got under his skin and
itched a little.

Panos said there were no statistics on the matter, but maybe half the
parents he knew of would call the cops on their kids.  Which means half
would not.  A matter for the I Ching, perhaps, or the confessional.

A lot of times, of course, he said, you never knew what a parent
understood and turned away from; they don't go around proclaiming it.
Even with drugs, even when the kid is stealing the gold out of his
grandmother's teeth.  .  .  it's like children protecting parents who
abuse them, they'll lie and go on taking it rather than give them up. He
told me this because I asked.

A defense lawyer, you know, is not just a prosecutor turned inside out.
He tends, by practice and maybe by temperament, toward a little
compassion for his felon.  He looks toward the whole damn merciful mess
he works up like someone staring into the tea leaves, assembling a life,
its reasons, its remorses.  I thought Panos would like Jacob to go free.
Was this transference?  Was it that I thought he wanted his batting
average, wins and losses, undiminished?

I doodled in my poor neglected sketchbook, I crosshatched and shaded,
making Jacob.  I'd done him so often in my sketches I could outline his
face in my sleep, I knew the little hooks and turns the pen took to make
him recognizable.  There's a fine line between a portrait and a
caricature, how far you push the uniqueness of each feature.

Advance, retreat, correct, revise.  Less neck, more forehead.  His nose
is not that pointy.  Thinner cheeks these days.  All this takes thirty
seconds.  When it works, it's a wonder.  I had a likeness of him, now,
under my hands.

I fed chunks to the woodstove and stood with my hands out, empty; passed
them over it the way magicians do across the top hat and the dove flies
out.  The things that almost happen in your life but don't, by a fast
flick of good luck.  If you've ever driven a car, you've almost died.
You've almost killed.  Plus the things you've come close to wreaking on
your own beloved kids, in anger.  Instantly repented.  Accidents, bad
temper, unreconcilable dreams-like another fine line between the
portrait and the caricature.  How can he give his life for a single
action?

I've seen the state penitentiary, concertina wire around it like
something in a war zone.

Well, I'd had my children, I'd had my career and even my petty
successes.  I wished I could go for him.  I'd do it, too, I wouldn't
hesitate.

Who would?  A new kind of plea bargain.

I seem to have put my head back and dozed.  What if, what if.

Nobody saw him do it.  Okay.  A quiet day on Poor Farm Road.  Dark like
the crosshatch in my sketchbook.  lIe was honest with us, certainly.

He was his own prosecutor.  If he hadn't admitted it, would we have
known for sure or just gone on suspecting?  If he'd kept his mouth shut,
or shrugged and said, "I don't know, I left her there"?  And I had
killed the evidence before I had a chance to think twice.  I had left
him some maneuvering room.

I did a subway sleep with my head bobbing.  Saw a policeman bend over a
body and lay on it, like a blanket, a drawing or maybe it was a photo,
of a skeleton.  Bones supple because they were canvas, a costume,
something like that.  I couldn't tell who the corpse was, even what sex
it was, but I felt it was Jacob, the way you do in dreams.

The policeman was tender.  He covered it up gently and it lay out on a
fast highway under a blanket of bones that glowed in the dark.  Cars
went around it without slowing down.  I woke up knowing what we would
do.  I could feel the whole thing in my hands like something solid, with
a shape to it.  It was all visible to me in the good work light.

If I couldn't go for him, I could chip a little at the possibility of
his going.  I could nick a corner here, build up an edge there.  Work at
it.

Dare to.  And if they took me in the end, all the better, maybe they
wouldn't take him.  Fathers and mothers died pushing their children out
of the way of cars.  Whose body was that, under the blanket of bones?

In the end someone would have to be forgiven, either Jacob for what he
had done, or me for having done nothing.  I'd rather-no contest, I
thought, no contest at all-spend my forgiveness on him.

Judith's piano teacher made her write some of her own music.  She liked
to be good at the things she did, and she was undone by harmony.

Now she was recopying it so that at least it would be neat, her dismal
little song that reminded her of kindergarten.  She sat at the piano
breathing hard with the effort of hating it so much.

"You weren't there," her father said suddenly from across the room.

He said it firmly, his voice husky.

Judith said, "Excuse me?"

Jacob had been crossing the room on the way to the stairs.  He stopped
short.  "Say again."

"You weren't even there.  You had that argument and you walked away from
her mad.  You left her with the car and the keys.  So you don't know
what happened when she was out on the road there alone."

Her brother was silent for a long minute.  "I didn't"Then you
reconsidered and you came back.  And you found her and you just
panicked.  Isn't this possible?  Listen: So you drove home in a total
fog and then you took off for Cambridge to get away.  To think.  Because
you knew of course you'd have to be a suspect."

She heard the kind of "ttkk" her brother made, pulling his tongue across
the roof of his mouth, when he was considering.  "The car?

Why would I bring the car home and leave without it?"

Her father was thinking, too.  They were making something, Judith saw,
their eyes bright with inspiration, bent over it like a shared project
at the worktable.  They were cozy.  Her dad leaned forward, stretching,
past his knees-she could just see him over her music.  He cracked his
knuckles and sat back up.  "So no one could find you.  You can always
trace somebody with a car.  But if you really had to get away-I mean,
you were terrified.  Who wouldn't be?" He looked pleased.  The missing
piece.

"God, Dad." Jacob breathed so hard he puffed out his lips, made a long
wheew sound.  "Do you really think this would-it's too simple.

It seems too easy.

Her father went to where Jacob was standing dumbfounded, just standing
where he'd been stopped and maybe saved crossing the room, and hid him
in his arms.  He was large enough to hide almost anybody.

They had never been this loving when Jacob was just Jacob, annoying and
disobedient.  He was surely ready to obey now.  It was disgusting how
eager he was.

Judith held her breath.  If she breathed in, the room would stink with
falsehood.  She wasn't sure what that would smell like, but she covered
her nose and mouth with one hand and closed her eyes against all of
them.  If they knew she was there, they didn't care.

"Dad," her brother said finally.  "Somebody saw me.  There was a
witness, remember, who waved to us when we were stuck by the fence, he
asked if we needed help and we said no.  And I don't know how many
others saw us."

"You don't have to remember any witnesses, Jake.  It's a quiet road."

"Oh, come on.

Her father gave a sort of Jack Nicholson grin, a little wild but also a
little charming.  "One word against another."

"One of them is an accused murderer."

"You say.  Stranger things have happened, an accused murderer could
actually tell the truth.  Anyway, who knows who the other one might be?
Could be somebody angry, who wants to help convict some-one.  A friend
of the girl's family.  That's not much to hang a whole case on." He
sounded so enthusiastic the whole scheme had the feel of a game he was
playing for pure pleasure.  "Or-look, so he saw you.  You aren't denying
you were there, you were stuck, right?  But that's not-you know, that's
not murder.  Panos told me first thing, he said, 'Murder is just an
assault without a witness,' something like that.

What do they have that shows you actually doing anything?"

"The car.  The jack."

"Clean.  Gone."

"Are you sure about the car?  How do you know they don't have-like, you
know, if there were any bloodstains left in there?  Maybe they have a
dog that can sniff for them or a test or something, who knows-" Her
father paused.  "Well, I don't.  I'm pretty sure, but I don't know, I
guess it depends on how precise and profound-how profound the search is.
I was incredibly careful, though.  The whole trunk is-rearranged.  As
for the jack-" He put his head in his hands for a minute, he seemed to
be resting from a large effort and who could blame him.  "Oh, Jake, I've
told you.  Forget that.  It's long gone.  Trust me.  Self-destructed. As
if it never was.

"Self-destructed, huh." Jacob smiled his most ingratiating grin.

"Should I not ask?" This was the same brother who wouldn't talk to them
before he came home, not a word, not a glance, only anger?  So simple,
Judith thought.  All of it, the dead Martha, Jacob screaming and
swinging, coming at her in the half dark, connecting with a terrible
sound, steel against bone, all of it was now pronounced long gone.  If a
tree falls in the forest and nobody hears (that was her favorite thing
to think about) .  .  .  but, Judith protested, but, but, but, even if
the tree's on the ground unnoticed, the girl's still dead.  Whether
anybody heard her scream or not.

Judith had to hold on to the sides of the piano bench to keep quiet.

She had argued with herself more than once by now that she wasn't the
household police.  If she wanted to be disgusted by eavesdropping or
wholesale lying, or tampering with weapons, even, she'd have to take
care of it herself.  Was this the kind of thing that made people run
away?  The idea had always appalled her, but she was beginning to be
able to imagine getting as far from them as she could.  Not yet, but
soon.  .

It was a little scary to think that way, because maybe eventually she
might be able to understand suicide, too.  So far, only Jacob fit any of
the allowable categories for suicide: Did something too horrible to live
with, something that can't be taken back or made better.  Guilt,
Physical Pain, and The World Too Unbearable were the only three
comprehensible motives she could find.  Death of a Loved One, like a
child, maybe that too, or of a lover, like Romeo and Juliet, but she
didn't think so.  (She allowed that, never having been in love, or even
near, she might have no right to an opinion.)  He deserved to kill
himself.  At least, if he did that he could prove his honest sorrow.

Otherwise-he was doubly guilty if he lived, and her father was worse.

She saw the smile, slightly mischievous, slightly menacing, altogether
unfamiliar, that he'd shown while he spun out their foolproof lie.

Whenever Snappy caught a bird or a squirrel or even a little lizard, she
made a strange sound in her throat, a plea, almost.  It was odd, excited
and frightened at the same time.  A quaking noise.  That was what he'd
looked like, in some funny way.  She had no words for it; she had no
name, right now, for her father.

If Panos had known Jacob he'd have found his story at least a little bit
suspicious-silences, imploring glances at me, lapses of what looked like
concentration but was, I could tell, conscience rising in his throat
like a pill that wouldn't go down.  (Or, if not conscience, then
confusion-he hadn't had very long to live with the revised story Or
both.)  I think Panos probably assumed this was a young kid, scared of
the whole situation, just in out of the cold of his stunned silence, and
shy in front of a lawyer: if he was nervous, who could blame him?

It was a little surprising that he didn't want to examine Jacob alone.

Maybe it was kindness, to keep him relaxed.  Maybe it yielded more to
see us together; or it was willful.  In any event, Panos did not know
Jacob.  Therefore, he listened hard while his assistant-a very earnest
and nun-like young woman in dark clothes and pearls, with tarnished
blond hair, named Mag Trottier I iligently wrote down everything he said
and taped it, too, for backup.  Panos interrupted as little as possible
but he had some questions.  Only once did I really worry about my son.
It was the part that was soft, the one plank that sagged, an imagined
action between two real ones.  "Tell me, Jacob, what was going through
your mind when you left her alone with the car?  Were you going for help
or were you angry or-" What was it they called that in court, feeding
the witness?  Leading.  He was leading him toward some plausible
possibilities.  (Did that mean he didn't think he had any of his own?)
Jacob looked at me fast as the lick of a cat.  "Take your time," I
wanted to say.  "imagine." That's all I was doing, imagining.  It wasn't
any harder for me to see the new story than the old one.  I suppose it
was harder for him.

"I was just mad," he finally said, almost inaudibly.  It was probably
pretty close to the truth of what he really had been feeling.  "I was-I
didn't want to do anything I'd regret."

Maybe a little too close?  But Panos took that.  It seemed extremely
honest, I suppose: admit you might almost be tempted to do violence, but
you were still, shaky or otherwise, in control.

"And what did you do when you walked away?  How long were you gone?" The
questions thickened, the possibilities for error mounted up.  Jesus. Why
didn't he see anybody pass him on the road when he trudged off?  He
walked a little, he said, then went off onto the margin of the woods,
off the road.  In the snow?  It's thinner in there.  Why the woods?  He
didn't want to meet anybody, and in case she came after him, he didn't
want to be found.  Did you see anybody?

No, but he was so angry he wouldn't have noticed, he wasn't tuned in to
things like traffic.

"Would anyone come forward who had seen him?" I asked, forgetting for a
minute that he had never been there.

"He doesn't sound very seeable," Panos said noncommittally.  "How far
did you go?"

Within sight of the first houses where Bottom Street meets Poor Farm
Road-he could see their lights, which would just have been coming on.

"And why did you turn around and go back?"

"Because I felt better.  I talked to myself about our argument and I
convinced myself we had some more things to say to each other.  So I
just hurried on back."

"And how long do you think all this took?"

"Half an hour maybe.  Maybe more, less, I'm not good at that."

So he found her.  I prayed he guessed right about where in relation to
the car tracks, because they did have those, I was sure.  They probably
had photographs.  Could there be some tiny little giveaway too small to
be accounted for?  The panic on his face as he told it was sincere.  No
way anyone could separate out one kind of terror from another.

"No weapon around?" Panos asked.

"I didn't see one.  But it was dark and I was-I was really scared."

"Where were the car keys?"

"In the trunk.  The trunk lock, I mean." Oh Christ, a shadow that
remained from the real story.  Because he'd gone looking for the jack.

"That's not where you left them?"

"I don't know," Jacob said.  "I can't swear where they were.  I guess in
the ignition, I don't know why they'd have been anyplace else."

But he didn't ask about the jack, whether there was one, or anything
about the trunk.  No weapon, after all, had declared itself.  It could
have been anything, a rock, a pipe, something the murderer took with
him.  I thought about the Jack-in-the-Box innocently folded into its red
case.  Had I screwed up in some unimaginable way, given the police lab
any easy answers?

For now I wasn't saying anything.

"How," Panos asked, with an inscrutable glance at Mag Trottier, who was
bent over the tape machine with the gravity of a surgeon over a deep
incision-"how did you get the car out when it had been stuck in the
snow?"

But in this version, praise the Lord, the utter paralysis of the car
hadn't played the same part it played in Jacob's story.  (Had the
witness seen the car up on the jack, that was the question.  We might
not know until it was too late.)  Jacob shrugged.  "I had to get out of
there.  I just gunned it and went."

"Why did you go home?"

He paused and I could see the fast calculation.  "I had to get some
money.

"Nobody saw you come in?"

"Nobody saw me.  My parents weren't home yet.  I don't know where my
sister was.

Bad move, I thought.  We'd have to cover for that somehow.  I couldn't
think this fast-wet footprints?  Anything else missing from his room?
Where would Judith have been?  (Napping instead of practicing the piano?
That was all too plausible!) A light sweat flushed my forehead with
cool, like a chill.

"You took the chance of running into all those people?"

"I figured if my mom's car was there I might not go in.  But she's never
that early.  The others-I just took a chance.  My dad's usually in his
workshop around then and that's not in the house, it's up the road a
little, behind the garage.  And I thought if I saw Judith I could-just
tell her something.  Anything.  You know." He shrugged.

"She pretty much believes everything I say."

If it seemed peculiar that Jacob had moved through Hyland as if it were
a deserted town that afternoon, seeing no one and hardly being seen,
Panos didn't say.  But I realized suddenly that being invisible might be
just as much a problem as it was a solution-you couldn't provide any
alternatives.  It left you naked, in a manner of speaking.

I hated making Panos into a sucker, it made me queasy.  I hated for our
lying to take personal advantage.

Panos sat back, closed his eyes, held his hands out in front of his chin
the way kids make a church and steeple with their fingers.  "All right,
Jacob," he said finally.  "What if I said it was pretty clear you did
it, you hit her with something and then took off."

I don't know if we gasped out loud.  "But I-" Jacob's face had turned
that terrifying red in one quick flush.  I felt like I was underwater,
out of air.

"Just say-I'm being the prosecution now-it's just as likely you're the
one who smashed her up, how can you prove you didn't?  'Nobody saw'
works both ways, you know."

"But," Jacob began again.  I was holding myself back with my fingernails
deep in my thighs, on the outside beside the chair where they were
invisible.  He gave me the look of the drowning.

"Don't answer that!" Panos said, very loud, and he held up his hand like
a traffic cop.  "Remember, Jacob, you don't have to answer that
question.  They have to answer it.  They have to prove something on you,
you do not have to prove the opposite."

"But what are alibis for?" I asked.  I think my blood pressure was
coming back down a little.

"Alibis help plenty.  But they rarely win cases.  They're another form
of hearsay-you know, your friend, your mother, you can always get
somebody to help you out by saying you were all just sitting around
watching the Celtics, eating pretzels.  That's better than nothing, but
it's soft.  It's soggy." He pushed at the air with two fingers.  It
yielded.

"Those cases still have to be won or lost on their merits and there'd
better be more solid evidence somewhere down the line."

"So this is good?" Jacob asked, looking truly innocent for the first
time that morning.

"This is-better maybe.  None of it is exactly what I'd call good."

He sighed.  "Good is never having to set foot in this office to begin
with, or in that bloody courtroom.  Good is-you know-dying in bed.  And
for you, buddy, not for a long long time." He smiled at Jacob sadly.
"Which reminds me-Mrs.  Reiser?  Pardon me-Dr. Reiser?  May I ask where
she's spending the morning today?"

The implication, of course, was clear-did she have something more
important to do than come here to discuss her son's defense?

We hesitated, both of us.  Possibilities whirled by like the numbers on
a wheel of fortune.

Jacob said she had the flu, before I could find a better, subtler
explanation.  She was feeling lousy and she said she wouldn't be much
help, he went on.  I wished he'd stop.  Panos made a little note and
smiled with his cards close to his chest.  That smile made me feel like
a defendant before a prosecutor.

I asked if he was entitled to a list of their witnesses.  He was
friendly enough with the D.A."s office, he said, so that he'd have no
trouble with that.

Jacob was silent and terribly pale.  I took a deep breath and asked what
kind of case we had.

Panos shrugged.  Mag Trottier looked miserable, but I was to discover
that she always looked miserable, as if being trapped in a room with a
possible felon was distasteful to her and not of her own choosing.

She reminded me of my cousin Frannie, who went to Wellesley when I was
twenty or so, all done up in clothes designed not to catch the eye but
to give instead a message about stability, about wifely appr I
priateness, as if she were a good solid banister you could clutch and
lean on, rising.  A professional good girl.  I had such contempt for
good girls, Jesus.  I thought about Martha for a minute, how she hated
Jacob for being nice to her.  But I got to grow out of that dumb
Baudelairean dream, given time enough and Carolyn's sweet patience.
(And, for symmetry, Frannie, who married her Harvard man as planned, had
gone a little wild herself later when the perfect marriage soured and
she sowed a few late oats and did a couple of utterly inappropriate
things it must have given her uncorseted soul some pleasure to
contemplate.) Panos brought me back.  "I think we've got a few things to
worry about.  But I'll tell you-if they don't have a lot more than a
couple of folks going by in cars when you're not in the act, right in
their headlights-" Jacob blinked as if the lights were picking him out
right now.

"I think they might not have a case at all.  Not to say this is going to
be so easy.  I've got to get some reliable word on their forensics.

But-" We had given him the bricks, I suppose, and now he had to build an
edifice, assemble it carefully so it would stand up no matter how it was
battered.  He already looked preoccupied, drifting off from us, or
rather, walking purposefully in his own direction, taking them to be
inspected in better light.  I didn't know how excited I should have
expected Panos to be.  I think I was waiting for the Mediterranean in
him to turn noisy and congratulatory when the story was delivered in
this stripped-own form, exonerating Jacob.  But his forehead stayed
contracted, his lips closed almost prissily while he worked out his own
problems with it and made quick little notes on his pad, as if this
weren't our business.  He was like Wendell, I suppose they're all the
same: he didn't need to be bothered with my fancy construction, he
didn't want too many soft facts to play around with.  Does he beheve it?

Carolyn would want to know.  Does it matter zf he dees?

We were already at the door when Panos put a hand on Jacob's arm.

"Jake, I'm slow sometimes.  I told you-getting old.  Let me ask you a
little something right here."

Jacob looked terrified; his fair skin was like a thermometer, the red
kept rising in his cheeks like mercury climbing with heat.

"I'm just curious.  What were the two of you fighting about?  Why were
you so mad?" Panos hit himself a glancing blow to the forehead.

"I can't believe I let all this go right by."

He was being disingenuous, thinking he'd catch Jacob off-guard.  I'd
have put money on it.  Motive is not something you forget to inquire
about.

My son smiled; hesitated; smiled some more, sheepish.  "She was
pregnant, for one thing."

Panos's face darkened with surprise.  He smiled, too, as if they had a
little joke between them.  "I think we need to go sit down again, kiddo,
just for a minute.  This sounds kind of serious." He took Jacob by the
arm and turned him around gently.

Jacob didn't wait to sit down.  "I think it was somebody else's, though.
At least she said it was."

Panos looked ready to break out of there and run around the block with
excitement.

"This is good, Panos?" I asked him.

"This is very good, friend.  This is the best news I've heard all day.

You think this baby belonged to somebody else.  Why?"

He shrugged.  "The way she told me.  I could-sort of-I believed her."

"You know who?  Christ Jesus.  Or can you guess?"

Jacob shook his head.

Panos let out a whoop like a drunken football fan and made a thumbsup
sign.  "You're sure.  And it couldn't have been yours?"

"Well, what do you mean?  Do you mean, were we-you know-"

"Right.  You know."

Jacob sighed.  "Well, sure we were.  Like.  But she told me this was
somebody else's."

"But, Jacob.  Kid.  What does 'she told me' mean?  She could have told
you that for a whole lot of reasons.  Wanting to tell the truth might
have been pretty far down her list." He flung over the page he'd filled
earlier and scrawled more emphatic notes to himself in the sloppy hand
of a doctor writing a prescription.  "The first thing we've got to do is
go to the medical examiner and get a DNA report.  Sheeesh.  This could
make us or break us."

That's not all that could break us, I thought.  What would he say -more
than "Sheesh," I bet-if he knew I was a liar, a tamperer, a fraud?  And
if I testified to all this, I'd be a perjurer to boot.  A certain
numbness had begun to set in, I thought, or I'd be a quivering puddle at
the mere thought of the headlines, not to mention the jail cell.  I
suppose this was what resolution felt like: your principles stiffen you
beyond mere feeling.  It was instructive, and it was lonely.

I prayed I had made nothing worse except-too late to pray for this-my
marriage.  Carolyn wouldn't speak to me that morning before we left to
see Panos.  She sat in her robe looking into the mystic steam of her
coffee, silent as my wooden man.  I had told her what we were going to
do.  I had promised her it was going to work.  She had not said a single
word.  I don't know if she was cursing us all the way out the door or
wishing us luck.  It wasn't fair, I thought, for Panos to hold her
absence against us as if she were a witness who'd refused to testify,
but he'd be right if he thought it signified.  It signified.  I wish I
could have thought it didn't.

Back in the car, headed through traffic toward the Queen City Bridge and
then out onto the open highway, Jacob was silent.  "You okay?"

I asked him.  The radio wasn't on, we had a lot of dead air in there
with us.

He shrugged.

I didn't want to push-that heavy-handedness Tony Berger warned me about.
God knows he had enough to be depressed about.  But this was sullen,
this slouch.  "Jake?"

Just a flicker of eyebrow, not very responsive.  He was way down under
his cap; he seemed to be hidden under it.  (The cap was the first thing
he reclaimed when they gave back his belongings; he'd punched it up,
lovingly, into the shape of a beret.) "How do you think it went?"

Long pause.  I mean long.  I was about to ask again.

"Did he like it, you mean?"

"What do-"

"Or did I like it."

"Like what?"

He turned to me finally, his whole slumped body.  "Your story."

"Well, Jesus.  Yes, my story, I guess.  Our story."

He looked away and I could see his eyes were full.  "Yours."

"Jacob." I wanted to stop the car.  If I hadn't had a pickup on my right
flank I'd have pulled off the road.  "Jacob, look at me.

He sniffed, but it was arrogance, not tears.  It was his old fuck-you,
teenage sniff.  It was his Don't-tell-me-what-to-do-please.

"Do you not want to save yourself?"

"Hey, look, exactly who's saving me here?"

"I'll ask you again, okay?  Don't be a child, Jake.  Do you want to save
yourself?  Or do you want to cast yourself on the mercy of strangers?
Because they're going to take one look at you, a strong, confident male
with a-terrible temperprot'able-and they'll see pictures of this frail
blond girl with her head-"

"She wasn't frail."

I smiled.  "Sustained.  All right, she wasn't frail, she was a
ball-breaker.  But they can't see that, it doesn't show up in the bloody
photograph.  And even if it did-just what do you expect they'll do?

These are not people who love you.

"All right, I know," he said, very impatient.  "I've already heard
this." He made it sound like we were arguing about breaking curfew.

"Jacob, you know what I'm suggesting?  I want to be clear about this,
okay?  All I'm suggesting is that we save your life first and later on
we can worry about your soul.  Is that too much of an intrvsion on
your-what is it, your space?  Tell me if it is.

He closed his eyes.  "I don't know, Dad.  I'm sorry.  I don't know what.
Of course I'm grateful." Tonelessly.  He slid down in the seat and put
his feet up on the dash.  His sneakers left a huge fog of dusty prints.
"Just let me sleep now, okay?  I'm so tired, jeez, you can't imagine how
tired I am.

We took the mountains, those wide, banked curves where the highway
flowed like a river.  Speed.  The air sucking at the car as it coasted
down Curry Mountain, so strong that if I opened the window the noise
would overwhelm us.  Goddamn, I thought, holding on.  I am no Abraham. I
will not sacrifice my son on the altar of any power that asks for him. I
am no hero of the spirit like Abraham.  He might have been the father of
his people but-blasphemy-he was no proper father of his son.  Who's out
there to be trusted?  Who can promise us a ram in the thicket of the
law?

Jacob had turned his head away toward the window.  He kept it there till
we were home in the slush of our driveway.  Then, before I had even
turned off the ignition, he was out the door and gone.

They were being subpoenaed, in language that invited no reply except
submission, to appear at the courthouse in Howe to answer questions.

The grand jury wanted them.

Wendell, who'd come over to watch a football game on television and,
Carolyn thought, to check up, almost wistfully, on their dealings with
Panos, explained the grand jury system in such detail that Carolyn lost
the point somewhere along the way.  It was worse than hearing football
made simple.  "In cities," Wendell said, "the juries are sitting all the
time.  Up here there's so little to do, they're off as much as they're
on." He winked.  "Isn't that why we live here?"

She got up and began to prepare a tray of snacks, as if this were the
All-American household: potato chips, tortilla chips, beer.  All she
needed to know about the grand jury, that magisterial name that made her
think of twelfth-century England, was that, called, you had to go.

No trial itself, it existed to decide whether there ought to be a trial.

"This is to protect the defendant," Wendell insisted, stretching his
legs in front of him, casual, though the defendant didn't sound very
well protected to her: he'd have no lawyer, there was no judge, each of
them would be allowed to hear no one's testimony but their own.

They could challenge none of it.  Protection?

("The way it really works," Panos told them in the voice he used for the
self-evident, "is the prosecutor gets what he wants.  Simple.

I i'1i':r1G 1 I 11t'ri I mP I ' I I 1 I rn h I I nia'e I riIior one of
these days if she gets lucky.  Not my idea of luck.  I'd never have
guessed she liked red meat that much, but.  .  .  Anyway.  He, she,
whatever, only presents cases that'll work.  That's what you have to
understand.

If they don't work, if the grand jury no-bills someone, you can believe
he didn't want to go to trial with it in the first place.  He's
grateful, he's off the hook on a lousy case.  If it's a good case, you
better believe they'll indict.  I'm not being cynical, children.  This
is what happens.") Jacob had joined the men on the couch in the den.  He
seemed to be trying to be the ordinary boy who sat in the kind of
household that provided these snacks with the ballgame.  He reached for
a beer.  "If the court says I'm an adult." He smiled.  Nobody restrained
him.  He looked more mature than he had before all this.  The contours
of his face were changing, but very subtly, the planes hardening.  In
spite of how thin he was, this had nothing to do with thinness, he had
something almost like the beginning of lines beside his nose.  He was
too young for the action of gravity.  But innocence rounds the cheek and
experience hollows it; also, she thought angrily, bad food.  It was
more, though: it was a loss of something in his eyes, an avidity, an
openness to take in anything you put before him, that ravenous gaze. The
unguarded look of a boy who didn't have much to dissimulate.  Of course
he had tried to look cool, even look jaded in the presence of his
parents.  Chiefly, that was a matter of hooding, half closing, the eyes,
if not actually rolling them heavenward.  But there was no weariness, no
bitterness in that, that was only his uniform, his allegiance, and he
put it on and took it off like his jacket.  She missed his insolence
now; it had been all style, no substance.  Now what she thought she saw
was the dregs of the self-protectiveness that had kept him mute until he
came home, and was still keeping him silent.  A desperate absence of
welcome.  Innocence was lost to him.  Was it guilt, then-double guilt,
the way Ben was compounding it I r was it fear that kept him aloof?

They drove into Howe in perfect ear-splitting silence.  Jacob didn't
come; they couldn't make him appear, and they couldn't hold it against
him.  (Who says they won't, she wondered.  Do they report who speaks and
who doesn't speak?) Carolyn wished she could have said to him, Now.  I
want to know about the postcards.  How did you do that?

Why?  Was that your dream of flight or was it just to mislead us, a hunk
of steak to the dogs?  Red herring, rather.  But she suspected he
wouldn't answer.  He might be talking now but that didn't exactly mean
he was seething with confidences.  The day was heartlessly bright, it
looked as if it ought to be warm in that sun, but it was twenty degrees
below freezing.  They filed into the quaint courthouse and were seated
in the hall outside the closed door of the jury room.

Panos was around somewhere, seeing to details of the procedure they
couldn't keep track of.  Mag, whose smile looked as if it were part of
her job description, assured them he'd be there to cheer them on, to
answer questions if they wanted to come out and check on something
before they committed themselves to it, to debrief them after they'd had
their turn.  Mag herself made a rather dry adviser: be brief, be cool,
don't try to play the emotional games everyone imagines trials are made
of.  No one will be impressed in there.  They're running, fast, through
the facts of one case after another, they have big books of times,
dates, and documents, and they don't particularly want to engage with
anyone.  (In a case like this, laden as it was?  Was she being naive?)
This sweet building, with its reverently restored paint and its long
windows behind their quilted shades that kept winter on the other side,
was nothing like the teeming city courts-it was so genteel it was like a
historical mock-up, a stage set in which nothing real could happen..

But then the strange part started.  Gently they were called, one by one,
as if their own privacy were being honored, and it was like the
discreetness with which patients were taken in for a medical procedure.

She felt as if they were at the hospital, not in a court of law.  The
throbbing of the lights, the hushed, considerate voices of the people
who told them where to sit, where to get Styrofoam cups of coffee out of
a machine, who called Fran Conklin first, all of it spoke of danger the
way the hospital did-as if health were in question and not punishment.

Who could guess what they were asking, now that Panos had swept away
Wendell's reassurances with a laugh.  The district attorney's office
would have its ducks in a row; there was no way there would fail to be
an indictment.  Panos had heard a rumor they weren't going after a
capital crime.  If that was true, he promised to take them out for a
drink when the long day was over.

They watched Fran Conklin coming out.  He nodded and turned his head
away.  A cop will not be sympathetic in the courthouse-it made sense,
she thought, it probably made more sense than being strained and
friendly, like political enemies who go for the jugular, then smile and
put away drinks together in the Senate lounge.

They-they was a round blond woman in pale lavender with matching shoes
as if she were going to a party-gestured Ben to the door.

It was not the double swinging door of a courtroom, it was just a room
with hard chairs lined up in rows like a classroom, and a scuffed little
table in front.

By now Mag had disappeared in search of Panos; she was alone out there.
She felt like one of her own patients waiting for a doctor to come out
and say, "Mercy has been granted." She was the doctor behind the door
who knew more than she wanted to about the illness, its bleak prognosis,
the pain it had yet to exact.

Panos appeared out of nowhere.  He was nearly jolly with excitement here
on his own turf.  "So?" he asked her.

"So?" Carolyn repeated.

"They said what and you said what."

"I haven't been in there yet.  It's been the police chief and now Ben.

Aren't you supposed to be out here to help us through if we're having a
problem?"

"Here I am," he answered, mock-innocent.  "Have there been any
problems?"

"You have fun at these things?" Carolyn asked irritably.  "Am I supposed
to be enjoying myself?"

"Carolyn, come on.  This is routine.  A little something you have to get
through.  We could have waived this thing and gone right into the trial
and it wouldn't have made any difference.  We do our work later.

I told you not to sweat it."

She looked disgusted.  "Since it's my only son's only life being
discussed in there, I suppose I'll sweat it if I want to."

"Suit yourself.  I just hope Ben looks cooler than you do.  You don't
want to get them aroused, do you?"

Ben probably looked plenty cool, she thought angrily, but you wouldn't
want to hook him up to a lie detector just now.  How ever in the wide
world was she going to manage to plead ignorance, to insist on such
omissions, such distortions?  How were they going to present a solid
front when it could all crumble at a touch and fall in around them?  He
was right, his story was plausible.  But it felt terribly laundered,
somehow.  It felt convenient.  Last night before bed she had asked him,
"Do you have misgivings about this, Ben?  This monster you've strung
together with spit and string-"

"If he needed an organ of yours," he had asked, unlacing his sneakers,
"would you give it to him?  Would you be frightened?"

"Of course I would.  Yes and yes."

He pulled a sneaker off and looked at a hole in his sock.  "All right,
then, sweetheart.  Yes and yes.  You understand me."

She sat looking straight ahead now, ignoring Panos.  Ben emerged then,
red-faced, enraged, and sat down so hard the bench quavered.

The woman in lavender, soft-voiced, appeared behind him.  Her eyes were
wide as if she'd seen something alarming.  "Mrs.  Reiser, I'm afraid
we'll have to ask you to come back on Friday morning.  We took longer
than we expected and we won't have time to examine you today." The
medical event again.  The woman smiled and smiled as if it hurt her.

"We don't sit tomorrow, but Friday at ten.  You can be here?"

"Fine," Carolyn said, smiling herself.  They were so casual you'd think
she was postponing an appointment at the hairdresser.  "That's fine.  No
problem." She was looking at Ben sidelong.  What had he done?  Good God.
The blond woman looked as if she were afraid of him, she kept darting
her eyes at him as if he might do something sudden and dangerous.  Had
he turned over the table?  Accused them?

"Benny?" she asked quietly.

Ben had leaned over and was embracing her hard, histrionically.

"Screw them," he said, hugging tight.  "Fuck the bunch of them." The
news people were arriving finally with their cameras.  "Right," Ben
said, standing, turning his chest to them defiantly as if daring them to
shoot.  They shot their flashbulbs.  "I didn't testify and I won't
testify and you can print any damn thing you want to."

"You didn't testify?" Panos repeated, his eyes boggling.  He looked like
a man in a cartoon.

"They've got these stupid questions, some of them I can't answer and
some are none of their damn business.  I couldn't qualify a thing, I
couldn't explain or enlarge or-"

"Oh Christ, Ben, why didn't you tell me what you were going to do?"
Panos hissed.  The three reporters were in the way.  "What the hell did
you think you were protecting in there?  Jesus." He pulled on his lapels
as if he were trying to lengthen them and paced up and back in front of
the bench.

"There's got to be some protection, there's immunity, some kind of
privilege so the state can't make you snitch on your own flesh and
blood," Ben said to the reporters, two young men and a woman.

"There's such a thing as the Fifth Amendment, you know.  Ask my lawyer."

The photographer for the Howe Record poked his old-fashioned camera in
front of Carolyn.  She put one arm around Ben, the other around Panos
and, grateful to be held up, stretched her mouth across doubt and
astonishment, across reason and wishful thinking.  Privilege?  Immunity?
Panos had mentioned no such things.  He had advised the most reticent
honesty they could summon.  No tricks.  She smiled so ingratiatingly she
half expected the reporter to say, "Come on, Mrs. Reiser, you expect us
to believe that?"

"Okay, Ben, we've got to talk," Panos said angrily.  "The jury's done in
there, come on into the room here and let's get a few things
straightenedout."

"Don't talk to me that way, Panos.  I'm paying you, remember, not the
other way around."

"Oh, buddy," Panos said, recoiling, "this has nothing to do with who's
paying anybody anything, goddamn it.  This is trying to keep your
stubborn hide out of prison.  If it's not too late." He pushed the door
open and they went inside.

"There is no privilege of the kind you're claiming," he told me, and he
told it to me very gruffiy.  "Did I need to be out there to whisper in
your ear as you went in?  Did I?" He sounded like my mother when she got
ready to shake me by the shoulders.  "How could you do this without any
consultation whatsoever?  They let you come out of there.

I told you to come out and ask if you had questions."

"I didn't have any questions.  Find me some privilege," I said.

"Fuck you, find me some privilege.  What, make something up?" He was
rushing around in circles.  "This state, and most states, let me tell
you, do not honor parent I hild privilege the way they honor
husbandwife.  There is no such thing even if you think it might be
convenient.

Find me some privilge."

"Don't sound so goddamn contemptuous.  I don't think this is the way
lawyers are supposed to talk to their clients, Panos.

"Yeah?  Well, most clients listen to their lawyers when they talk to
them, Ben.  You don't treat me like your lawyer, I don't treat you like
my goddamn client."

"This rudeness, I suppose, is a form of concern.  It's for my own good."

"Fuck rudeness.  Amy Vanderbilt isn't going to do you any good in a
court of law, sir.  You don't take this seriously, that's your trouble.

You really don't, you're incredible.  You're not like any client I've
had.

You think you can make the rules and everyone will fall in line behind
you.

"Oh," I said, "I'd like to believe that!  You've never had anyone
second-guess you?  Go their own way under questioning?  You maintain
iron discipline?"

"Not with such utter, absolute, total disregard of the consequences,
buddy.  Do you know what you're asking for?"

I did not.

"You're asking to go to jail for contempt, for starters.  You may be
asking me to go to jail for contempt, and I'm doing no such thing for
you, thank you.  You're raising suspicions about your son, your beloved
boy, by playing fast and loose with the grand jury.  Enough for you?

Why do you think you can play with this thing any way you want to?  How
strong do you think your will is?"

"Well," I said, "try me.  Plenty of people bend the system and twist it
and make it do their bidding.  The bastards in Congress who get out of
dirty deals clean.  Ollie North, what about him.  The drug pushers who
go in and come right out practically the same day.  The plea bargainers.
Why can't you"You're daydreaming, sonny, Panos said to me roughly.
"Your son's in a different category and you know it, or if you don't
you'd better figure it out.  Your son is up on murder one, maybe, or
maybe a little better-if we're lucky, I mean very lucky,
manslaughter-and he's not going to get treated like a congressman or a
fucking army general in a uniform full of hash.  The best you're going
to be able to hope for at this rate is that you two can share a bloody
jail cell.  Can't you see it, People magazine'll come and do a story on
you-roommates behind bars.  Jesus."

"The problem," I said to him quite calmly, "is that I have a principle
here and I'm not trading it for a plea bargain or out of fear of the
jury or anything else your system wants to come up with.  So I'll go to
jail.

Worse things could happen."

"Worse things might," Panos said.  He was so angry he couldn't even come
near me, he kept walking around the periphery of the chairs that were
set up as if for a lecture or a concert or something routine.  "And the
principle is what?  I think I missed that part."

"I don't bargain for my son, and I don't help them convict him.

That's what I told them.  I gave them a statement of principle.  Not
that I have a single thing to hide, but why should I help them clamp the
shackles on his wrists?  Let them find out what they need to know
without my help as a witness."

"Don't you have anything to say that would help him?  I thought you were
satisfied with his story."

I stared into the darkness that had begun to surround everything the way
light surrounded it before.  I don't know why I didn't just lie for him,
I'd have attracted a hell of a lot less attention if I'd said I don't
know, I don't know, I don't know.  But the way they came at me, the
whole bitter assumption that I'd help them along.  .  .  I prayed to God
I hadn't done something to doom him accidentally.  "Nothing," I said.

"He didn't do it and he's explained what happened.  But I won't lead
them to any of it, that's not for me to do.  You said so yourself."

"I said you don't have to solve it for them.  I didn't say you could
kick them in the butt."

"He's responsible for what he did and didn't do.  He can account for
it."

Panos seemed surprised.  "He is, but you're not."

"No, you don't understand," I said again.  "You still don't.  He did
what he did and I didn't have anything to do with it but to accept it
when he told me about it.  Now it's time for me to do something and I'm
doing it: I'm refusing.  They're trying to get me to second-guess him,
they're going to trick me into giving some kind of conflicting evidence
and I won't play that game with them.  I'm not going to help them take
him from me.  If there was any more I could do, you'd better believe I'd
do that, too."

"Take him from you?  You just said he's on his own.  So, is he or isn't
he yours, as you put it?"

"Whatever.  That's for me to decide, I guess.  All I can do now is just
keep saying, No help from me."

"But you're playing with them, Ben.  I see you show-boating for the sake
of your own ego.  If you've got a problem taking orders from a
constituted authority-"

"Why is it playing?  I'm as serious as I know how to get.  If they
convict him, let it be without my help.  I thought you lawyers were
always saying, like when you defend some god-awful hardened case, some
foul guilty unrepentant bastard, Let them do their job.  That's what
everybody says to Carolyn when she asks how you can work for some of the
sleazes who come through your door.  How many times have I heard it: If
they can't figure out how to convict somebody, whatever he did, then the
state's failed in its responsibility.  Well, why doesn't a father get as
much chance to say that as a defense lawyer gets?"

"A purist," Panos said with the disgust I'd expect from one of them.

His or theirs, he is one of them, his head is full of procedure, and
I'll forget it at my peril.  No respect, only anger at the inconvenience
of having to figure out how to handle me.  "A purist," he said again.
The insult of it.  "One of those existentialist heroes you read about in
college.

Me: "Okay, a purist.  I don't know about who you read in college.

But yes, I think parents ought to be purists, at the very least.  Keep
their hands in their pockets and their mouths tight shut.  Without
apology."

My father once said an interesting thing to me.  He was not one of those
doctrinaire Old Testament types, in spite of the number of hours he
spent decked out in his ritual artifacts praying, and he may have been
unconflicted about everything, crystal clear in his expectations and his
own performance, but there was justice in all his dealings.

And once, when I was in some kind of trouble-my friend Mike and I had
committed some sin in school, I don't remember what, but it had caught
my teacher's eye and she had demanded a parental visit-he came back from
his hour in my classroom disgusted by the behavior of Mike's father.  Or
maybe it was his mother, or both.  Whoever was there for him.  They lay
right down in front of the teacher, he reported to me, thoroughly
bemused by the treachery of it.  They nodded at her and they agreed to
all their son's bad habits, they even enlarged on them with examples of
their own!  So the schoolteachers are the authorities, he said.  So they
have the power.  So?  Why do these American parents run out on their
children?  They just sell them out so they can please any stranger who
has a complaint about them!  I'll deal with my son at home, thank you, I
have the right to do that, but when I'm in public with you.  .  .  I'll
tell you something, Benny, he said.  Maybe I shouldn't try to improve on
what Moses heard, but I always thought there should be an eleventh
commandment.

I was stunned at his faithfulness.  I wasn't even sure he was right, I
of all people was ready to allow that under certain circumstances
somebody besides my father deserved to have at me.  But you can imagine
I was grateful.  What commandment?  I asked.

Honor thy children, he said to me.  I haven't forgotten it.  I probably
got the back of his hand or had something I liked taken away from me for
a while, locked up in his closet that actually had a key that he kept
hidden (I knew exactly where: in his top drawer under his socks and
handkerchiefs).  I'm not saying his methods of punishment were original
or enlightened.  But the thing is, he took care of it privately.  Out
there in the enemy world, even if he didn't believe my perjured version
of the event, it was the most basic point of pride with him to be my
shield and my defender.  Everything else was somebody else's business.

To aid and abet my punishers would have been to ask his blood to flow
backward in his veins.  "It is," I can hear him saying, "unnatural."

Now I could argue the other side of that, say that's a kind of trim
alism.  That's how those poor suckers got done in in the Bible story
where Jacob's daughter Dinah is raped and to avenge her honor her
brothers end up laying waste to a whole regiment of innocent men who are
the rapist's retainers: a really gory preemptive strike.  Family
devotion run amok.  But my father, no warrior, seemed to be motivated by
a humble man's simplest understanding of the obligations of parental
love.  He was talking defense, which is passive, which lives as a
principle; he was not talking offense, which calls for action.  That was
something I could understand.  Non-violent resistance.

So, I thought, I am only being his son now.  I am only honoring the
father, finally, who honored his children.  I see, of course, why I had
such a hard time walking away on my own two feet-it was too late to be
as unconflicted about all this as Herschl Reiser.  But it was not too
late to close my eyes and see him nodding approval as he rarely did when
he was alive and I was that boy who needed so much defending.

One of them showed up in school right at the entrance to her classroom.

Somehow he had gotten permission, she couldn't believe it, to track her
down and humiliate her in view of everyone.  "Can I just talk to you for
a minute, Judy?" he'd asked confidentially, very cute, yo'ing,
eager-looking, in khakis and sneakers, the sort of person she'd love to
talk to otherwise.  But she could see his camera dangling half out of
sight.  "No," she answered without even looking at him and shouldered
past him and went into the room.  He made it sound as if he really
wanted to talk to her, but she knew already from the pushy, nosy
reporters who'd flooded right over them that it wasn't her he wanted but
something from her that he could sell to strangers.  She walked to the
rear, facing the bulletin board, and stood fussing with nothing,
pretending to be busy, praying he'd be gone when she turned around.

Her hands shook.  Of course they all whispered, why shouldn't they?

If it had been somebody else, tracked down and caught, she'd be
whispering, too.

How many seventh-graders were on the Boston evening news?

("Made" the news, Celeste called it.  Some accomplishment.)  Their faces
were probably known now, and their "story," in other cities, too, all
across New England.  Maybe across America.  Lurid was the word her
mother used.  It sounded like a chicken's neck being wrung.

She imagined a whole scene around it: "Don't bring me that bird until
it's completely lurid," the mother says, and the daughter twists her
wrists in opposite directions, feels the snap, and the neck hangs loose.

She had been at Celeste's house for Celeste's birthday party, a chancy
event only intermittently fun because she was a stranger to them all,
warily waiting for someone to accuse her of something of which she was
not guilty.  When they did slambooks (a curse under the best of
conditions), she found herself holding her breath.  Someone called her
Most Serious and two girls said Nicest.  They weren't honest but they
were kind.  When the evening had wound down and the gift wrap was
sufficiently trampled into the den rug, Celeste's father offered to
drive her home.  He was taking Lori up the road past Judith's house-her
parents car was in the shop-so he'd drop her on the way.  He was
especially cheerful when she was around these days, whistling, joking,
trying to jolly a smile out of her.

Lori was going on about which animals belonged in the rodent family and
which were unfairly included-how did they ever get on such a subject?
Even as Celeste's father drew into the last long mean curve, Judith
could see an odd flickering from the hill on the left, where her house
sat far back, invisible from the road.  It looked like a blinking neon
sign, its light thrown high and then low and high again.  Lori was still
chattering when they turned into the driveway (minks were not rodents,
but squirrels were) and Mr.  Charters braked with a bump.

"Jesus!" he said.  "Holy Jesus Christ!" In the middle of the lawn, near
the old well, stood a tall figure with its arms outstretched.  It was
clothed in flame.

Judith gasped.  It was strangely beautiful-beautifully strange-like
something you might come upon at sea or on a mountaintop, anyplace far
from home, where things can be huge and out of scale.  She'd seen a
movie once in which a ship's mast caught fire from some incredible
commotion in the sky, and it throbbed with light just like this.  Its
orange tongues licked wildly out into the dark and sparks flew off and
blinked out or fell into the snow.  Some of them took off in an updraft
as if they were going to join the stars.  It was nothing like a blaze in
the stove or the fireplace, but a whole different element, serious and
spectacular, a vast hole in the dark, in a nimbus of something like
sunlight.  "It's a goddamn cross!" Mr.  Charters said in a kind of whis
per, the way you might talk about a miracle.  "I don't believe it.  The
bastards!"

They parked a good distance back and Judith leaped from the car.

Celeste's father was calling after her not to go near it.  But she was
running for the house, because none of them had seen it, no one was
outside with it.  It must have just happened, maybe just a few minutes
ago, or they'd surely have noticed the wanton light going on and off.

She jerked open the door and shouted.  Apparently it was supposed to be
frightening-Mr.  Charters had called the people who did it bastards-but
she couldn't resist thinking the tower of light was glorious, like
something struck into flaming grandeur by nature.  That, she knew, was
called an Act of God.  After so much that was mundane, and so much
innuendo, the muttering under the surface, this was extraordinary.  It
was huge and clear, God talking from the mountain: Thou shalt not kill.
It was Ezekiel seeing the burning wheels-her father had read her that
story.  "Stay far back from there," he called now, breathing hard. "That
thing's going to fall over soon.

When they had watched it for a while-she was so mesmerized she could
have stayed there all night-her father announced that he was calling the
police, "whatever their attitude," and turned to go inside.

Celeste's father kept saying, "I'm so sorry, God, this is terrible, this
is like-Birmingham or Mississippi or something." Then her father found
the papers nailed to the front door.  "Goddamn, it's Martin Luther
time!" She thought he said it with relish.  Martin Luther-did he mean
Martin Luther King?  He had crosses burned for him, didn't he?

Her mother was silent and shivering.  Judith put her arm around her
waist.  "It's okay, Mom," she murmured.  "It isn't actually hurting
anybody."

The pages were a petition, Xeroxed, that claimed to bear 493 names.

RE5 I iND JA60B I:EI5ER BAIL!  It insisted that his presence in the
community constituted a menace, that his behavior was dangerous and
unpredictable, and that his parents also be jailed for their criminal
behavior.  "He has been identified for a long time as a community
menace," it finished.  "We the undersigned do not want him loose in our
town."

Jacob leaned down as his father, standing in the flaring light, com
pleted the text in a mockingly grand voice.  He picked up a handful of
snow and baIled it in his palms, his breath growing ragged, his face
contorted.  He aimed the snowball at the fire.  It passed right through
and hit the wood with a moist slap, like fruit smashing open.  He made a
dozen balls, whirling and bending, rising and throwing, and most of them
sailed right through the flame and expired futilely in the darkness. "So
I'm a dog, right?  Now I'm a dog, and they want me tied up." Judith
thought of the little yellow dog he had flung stones at the way he was
throwing snowballs now.  "Everything's connected," her father always
said.  "What goes around comes around." She had never understood even
vaguely what that meant.

She wanted to see him repent.  She wanted to see him make a dash for the
burning body of the cross and try to throw himself into the fire.  Of
course somebody would save him I ne of their parents would grab his arm
and soothe him: Jacob, don't be foolish, come inside now.

But she wanted to see him accept his guilt for at least an instant, and
bleed for it.  Or burn.

Around the bottom of the cross the snow had become a puddle.  In the
morning, or later, after the ashes had cooled, there would be an icy
ring there.  Ice was what her brother made her think of, not fire.

Ice was what he deserved.

She stood herself beside him and whispered, in a voice she barely
recognized, "I wish they would take back your bail.  I wish I didn't
have to see you." She turned to her mother, who looked alarmed.

Tears had begun to rise into her throat and stop it up.  She hadn't
known she was going to say these things.  "I wish he was dead!" she
shouted, and she flung herself, her whole weight, against him.
Offguard, Jacob stumbled backward and landed with a crunch.  It was
almost comic, the way his legs rose up acrobatically.  Then there was
nothing for her to do but take off running, her boots piercing noisily
through the skin of ice that sealed the snow.  It was so exhausting to
pull her feet out of each hole that she knew she wasn't going anywhere.

Shards of frozen snow were shad as glass around her ankles.  But if he'd
heard her it was good enough.  She didn't want a brother anymore.

She wanted to wake up in the morning and not have to see his insolent
face that was ruined for her and ruined everything else and made them
all into freaks.  From far across the lawn-the huge lawn that had
spooked Martha, that made her think he was rich-the cross began to
buckle with a sound like sluicing water.  It poured down slowly, just
slipped to the ground almost reluctantly as if it had to rip itself
free, and she saw her family standing together in a ring around it,
taken back into darkness, all the light quenched.  Only their shins were
lit, ankle to knee, with the dying fire.  Judith stood with her own legs
in the broken snow, her toes beginning to ache with the cold.  White
smoke rose, fierce as flame itself, urgently.  It climbed straight up,
higher than the cross had been.  The bastards who did this could
probably see it from their lawns, if they were out in the darkness
looking.

Water seemed to be the only medium in which she felt comfortable these
days-it was either a primitive salve of redemption, that coating of pure
transparency, or simply warm, supple, undemanding.  In the bathtub she
watched sharp little waves rise around her knees like a lake in rough
weather.  When she'd been to visit her parents in Hilton Head they'd
taken her to the edge of the Atlantic, a soft long brushy walk along the
coast.  They had pointed out fastnesses of the Confederacy out there,
islands that had held munitions stores, inlets where Southern ships had
moored.  What were they doing there, Ira and Bea Miller, mixed up with
the Confederacy?

Then again, what was she doing, not to mention Ben, son of the pious
Herschl, buried in his skullcap and tallis, living here a few miles down
the road from where William James had spent his summers.

They were an hour or so from Emerson's house, and Bronson Alcott's
failed farm, and all the rest of the great WASP fathers, descendants of
the Mathers, the Wigglesworths, those Old Testament scourges.

Her house, hers and Ben's, had an amplitude and purity of desigu that
her poor Old Country ancestors had never dared dream of: they lived like
landlords.  It wasn't exactly hers, that knowledge lurked out of sight
always, but she didn't know what it meant I nly that she hadn't been
born here like Celene, had merely chosen it?  She hadn't been born to
her parents either, they had chosen her-what did all this signify?  That
choice is inferior to chance?  Surely you could be born where you didn't
belong, not to mention to parents who didn't need or want you.  She put
her head back so far, contemplating, that the hair at her neck drew the
warm soapy water up into itself like a dry towel.

There was a timid scuffling at the door, which she always closed with a
hard rubber wedge but didn't lock when she was bathing, in case someone
needed access fast.  Judith put her head in and was instantly hazed over
with steam.  "Can I talk to you?" she asked in a tiny voice that seemed
to expect nothing, and pulled her sweater around her waif-like, as if
the bathroom were not warm as soup.

It was the lying, she said.  It was the assault on her sense of reality,
though she didn't call it that.  Carolyn watched distress bring out
every incipient twitch and tremor of uncertainty in Judith, who looked
as if her limbs might detach and fly off around her.  She looked so
queasy she must be nauseous.  Her eyes were pink.

She spoke very deliberately, as if she'd been practicing.  "He is lying.

He is completely changing the truth of what happened, Mom.  How can you
let him do that?"

It was not a good moment for Carolyn to be naked and off her feet.

Judith looked levelly at her face, ignoring the rest of her, long and
pale under water that was slightly bluish, like the milk she'd first fed
her daughter.

"Tell me what you mean, Jude." She knew exactly what Jude meant.

"What do you mean, tell you.  They're acting like-first Daddy buries
that-thing.  That horrible thing he killed her with." Judith's eyes were
full and when she moved they overflowed.  Water water everywhere,
Carolyn thought, so loose she felt as if she'd been drinking.  Her
daughter's face was drenched, her upper lip sweated with tears.  "Now
they plan this whole story-I was sitting right in there, in the room
with them, and they just ignored me.  Like it didn't matter that I could
hear all this stuff, and they were planning how to-just -how to lie
completely-about what actually happened!  You heard Jacob, you know what
happened." She was a beautiful girl, Carolyn thought abstractly-it was a
new way to see her, across this distance that had sprung up like mist
between her and every other thing.

(Thing?  she thought.  Judith a thing?) And what difference did it make
that she was beautiful.  What did beauty have to do with anything?

								 "Are you going to do what Daddy did?  Not talk to those jury
people?" She narrowed her eyes as if she was trying to look comicstrip
mean.  "Or are you going to just lie when you go there?"

She had nothing to say, she had no plans.  She lay there dissolving, her
cells softening into the water, her fingertips withering as if she were
in a time-lapse film, becoming a crone in minutes.  Sleepy she was,
barely able to concentrate.  "Jude-people don't go to court to
necessarily tell the truth about everything that happened." It was an
effort to say anything at all, let alone the right thing.  "They go to
defend themselves the best they can and if anyone can prove that what
happened was"Just because that's what people do-just because they might
get away with it-" She looked desperate to flee.  From where she lay,
Carolyn could see the top of Judith's head repeated in the mirror, her
fine light cap of hair.  Twice trapped.  Her hands kept rising in front
of her as if she were lifting something she couldn't get off the ground.

"How can you just plan to go and lie like that?  I thought Daddy was the
only one who lied." She had begun to cry noisily, punishingly, the way
she used to when her big brother did something unfair which she wanted
to advertise.  "You let Daddy convince you.  It's disgusting."

Now she cast her glance down the whole of Carolyn, from the hair she had
stacked messily on the top of her head with a barrette, slowly the
length of her fair unprotected body, to the two pink feet that stuck up
like something growing awkwardly out of the water.  "And nobody cares
what I think.  I'm just a stupid little kid, is all.  Nobody even cares
if I go tell."

Carolyn sat up slowly as if she were in pain.  The water broke and fell
back down.  She was shiny, polished like Ben's best wood.  Was that what
was upsettingJudith, that they hadn't considered her a player at all?
Was she insulted that the plot didn't include her?  "What do you mean,
'tell'?" She wasn't alarmed, only surprised.

Judith looked as if she were scratching her way up out of some place
where she couldn't breathe.  She stretched her neck tight, as if to find
some open air, then wiped her face viciously with the back of her hand.
"Figure it out," she shouted and, bolting, tried to slam the door behind
her.  But the little rubber wedge, loose on the floor like a hockey
puck, caught and held, and the door stopped halfway open, jammed there.
Cold air poured in as if it were a crosscurrent of water.  It chilled
Carolyn like a judgment.

Drying off, she decided what she'd say to Judith.  She'd remind her that
even the court makes distinctions.  There was something called "sudden
passion arising from adequate cause"-so Panos had instructed as he
walked them through the inventory of defenses-and even if they knew all
the facts, they would not find Jacob a simple murderer, using that
standard.  Why, then, could they not use the same compassionate standard
themselves?  They knew Jacob, they had heard his pained admission, and
things had advanced in such a way that they were going to have to be his
arbiters, not a jury box full of strangers.  Even the strangers would
come to the same conclusion, that he had had his agony already.
"Please," she was going to say, "don't feel guilty for wanting him to be
free to go on with his life, after all the horror he's already felt. The
disgust at himself.  The fear.  He didn't plan to do this damage. Please
go on loving him."

Warm in her robe, she started for Judith's room across the dark hallway,
but Judith called out to her, a disembodied voice.  "What if It was me?
Mom?  What if I was the one who somebody killed?" She must be sitting in
the blackness, her back against the wall; she must have been crouched
there, waiting for her mother to come out of the steamy bathroom.

Carolyn stopped.  The question raised every fine hair on her neck like
wind.  Judith, for God's sake.  "What if you were the one who killed
somebody?"

There was a long pause.  Judith breathed stickily into it, the way she
sounded when she'd been crying and her nose ran.  I wouldn't!"

she insisted in a small shocked voice.  "No way!  I couldn't ever do
anything so horrible."

Here was the difference between them, then, however smart and
well-intentioned her daughter might be: she was a child and there was so
much she couldn't imagine.  "Never say never, darling.  Do you think
Jacob thought he could do what he did?" Carolyn raised her voice into
the dark.  "That's the hard part, Judith.  Someday-"

"Don't tell me 'someday,' I can't stand when you say 'someday'!"

She sounded like a child again.

Carolyn sighed heavily.  "Oh, Jude, why can't I say 'someday." It's too
early for you to know some things.  You're not supposed to know them, or
even believe them when you hear.  I'm just beginning to learn some of
them myself." That was the big surprise, the deepest, the last.  Twelve
or thirteen was a good age for virtue and evil.  At her age they
were-unseemly.  Jacob must feel that, too.  Nothing that can't happen.
Happen to happen.

She grappled her hand across the wall, crawling with her fingertips, and
threw on the light the way she'd toss a pail of water, in one douse,
without a warning.  Its brightness astonished her.  Judith, caught in
the flash of cold light, leaped up from her corner and fled.

Jacob used to say the Blood Drawing sounded like a lottery or a raflle
where they fished your name out of a bowl.  Twice a year a large white
truck would pull up to the door of the Congregational Church basement
very early, and out would come roomfuls of equipmentcots, enamel tables
for work stations, endless yards of tubing, stacks of heavy plastic bags
that puddled up like pools of water, tape, stickers-and the nurses set
it up as quickly and elliciently as a field hospital in a war that kept
on moving.  Well, no wonder they had it down-when it came to town it was
as thrilling as the circus, but the staff that rode around with the
truck, east to west, north to south and back again, assembled it every
day of the year minus weekends.

Carolyn had signed on months ago as one of the two doctors of the day.
The grand jury didn't meet again until tomorrow.  She saw no reason not
to go now.

Not true.  She saw reasons and they offended her.

Ben had been on the news last night-radio only; thank God Howe was too
small for a TV station-and he had surely been on the CB gossip channel.
Grand jury proceedings were secret, but he'd made his pronouncements to
the press.  And yes, the D.A.  had said, indeed we are, we're going to
hold him in contempt.  Annie Dineen had called, and half a dozen others,
to ask what the hell he thought he was doing.

Wendell had come over in person to sit in the kitchen and be grave and
censorious.

"Too bad about them," Carolyn said.  "I have a life to lead.  The town
has its needs, too, you know.  It doesn't just revolve around us and our
problems." dying in the bathtub, she had finally thought (and then
pulled herself out of the water and stood as still as the shaman
spattering everywhere), It is up to me whether this thing kills all of
us or only some of us.  Kills me.  Kills Judith.  Maybe it was time for
some emotional triage.

"They've probably replaced you," Ben suggested.  She was having an early
breakfast and he was watching it with a sickened face.

"I'll deal with that when I get there." Biting into an English muflin
sharply, the way she'd snap thread.

"It could be embarrassing."

She looked hard at him.  He slept in a sweatshirt and sweatpants in this
season, gray and a little raggedy.  "look who's talking." She drank her
coffee contemplatively.  He reminded her of the Pillsbury doughboy.
"Anyway, I've already been embarrassed plenty.  That's not the worst
thing."

She shrugged into her white hospital coat before she left the house.

Ordinarily she'd have waited till she was at the church, but it felt so
good, it smelled so familiar, smelled of her real life, pungent and
scratchy with cleanliness, its pockets deep enough for a stethoscope and
many small useful objects, that she couldn't wait.  She put her winter
coat on over it.  "I'll either be back in fifteen minutes with a black
eye or I'll be all day." She left him standing in the doorway waiting,
she was sure, for a call from her other life, from Panos, who would
still be angry.

Amazing that there'd be people lined up at the door to give away their
blood, exactly the way they queued up for bargains at the biannual
rummage sale.  It was all ritual, it was altruism laced with peer-well,
not pressure exactly.  Expectation, maybe.  Duty.  Staying a part of
things, paying your social dues.  This didn't work half so well in big
cities; it was what Hyland did best.

She parked around on the far side, away from the crowd that was already
assembling, and went in the back entrance.  Most of the faces she saw
were the circuit-riding nurses'; none of them looked at her with
particular interest.  One, a woman with a voice like an emery board,
Jerry, had worked with her a dozen times before.  She was a high-colored
redhead who looked as if she might take a nip or two to get through. She
said a warm hello, innocent.  Carolyn was so happy to see her that her
eyes filled.  She was setting up the leather chaises that had replaced
the cots that had made the whole enterprise look a little like a
Victorian hospital ward.  They looked like a good place for a nap.

"Hey, doc, how're things?" Jerry asked.

A sick joke, Carolyn thought.  "They've been better, Jerry.  How've you
been?  How's your daughter?"

"Ah, you always remember.  You're so sweet!" So she got to hear about
Jerry's daughter's wisdom teeth, an involved saga with a terrible price
tag attached, and the experience of unbearable pain.  Carolyn delivered
coos of sympathy; nobody's troubles should be mocked because they didn't
measure up on the grief meter.  But, then, they shouldn't all have to
share the word pain; there ought to be different words for kinds and
degrees of pain, she thought, like the Eskimos twenty-four kinds of
snow.

The local volunteer in charge of the day came in hastily with her
clipboard, saw Carolyn, and stopped short.  Minette Schact was a pretty,
small-featured woman in an autumn I olored plaid skirt and vest.  She
was the kind of decent, organized citizen whose heels never wore down
and whose stockings didn't run, the kind you wanted in charge of your
campaign.  She looked ripe for judgment of women with unruly sons.

"I hope you have me on your roster, Minette," Carolyn said mildly,
without flinching.  "I've been on since fall."

Minette looked flustered under her neat dark curls.  Clearly she'd have
liked to produce a superior just then, at whom she could thrust the
problem.  "Well, we have Dr.  Rafferty and-uh, Dr.  Caldwell-"

"But you can always use a third," she said amiably.  "Or if one of them
would like to be relieved-" She was not going to plead.  Doctors were
supposed to be the authorities of the day here.

That was when she discovered the power of the negative to neutralize
opposition: the more Minette wanted to forbid her taking part, the less
she could do so.  Because, she supposed, feelings ran so high against
her, all these good people could do was swallow them back down, or else
they'd have to acknowledge them in public, they the state prize winners
among blood donors, a town replete with holders, even repeat holders, of
the gallon-club pin shaped like a drop of blood.  Minette fell back as
if she'd been physically threatened.

There was never actually a lot for the doctors to do, but the state said
they had to be in attendance.  The nurses took pressures, temperatures,
pricked fingers and pressed cotton against the nick, suspended blood
samples in little vials and watched to see how they performed.  She did
less: asked questions anyone could have managed, about illness and
travel-not many sojourners to Mozambique or Mayanmar at risk in Hyland.
She was an extra, though, today; she would spell the finger-prickers,
she'd dismiss them to have a smoke or a snack.  She could hold on to
some warm live flesh, old times, and they'd be happy with time off.

Drs.  Rafferty and Caldwell (George and Scott, one ancient and
hardof-hearing, the other so brand-new he looked like a college boy)
were polite but bewildered.  "Carolyn!" Rafferty said too loudly,
opening his eyes wide in case they weren't working right again.  "They
didn't tell me you were on.  I rather thought you'd-" He stopped
himself.

They were in the rackety wooden hallway near the coatracks.

"I've taken a leave, George," she said, nearly out of breath with the
effort it took to sound casual, "but, you know, I'm not officially off
the staff.  So I consider this still my obligation."

There were clots of people staring, she knew, of course she knew, and
some of them she was sure would keep their distance-if only nobody
emptied a bag of blood on her, or called her some terrible name out
loud.  She remembered the cheerful white-haired nurse who had ambushed
her with scurrilous suggestions about what to do with Jacob.

"look, Carolyn," the old man said in a carrying voice.  "I think you're
getting a bum rap, I hope you know that." She wanted to shush him, good
intentions and all.  "I mean, let's wait for the courts to sort things
out.  That's what they're for, dear, aren't they?" His aristocratic,
nasal voice was querulous.

"Thanks, George," she said, and touched his arm.  "I'm grateful."

"Well, a lot of people are rooting for you, you know, only they tend to
be, ah-rather the more quiet part of the population.  Discreet.  But I
trust you know that."

She supposed she did; she suspected Dr.  Rafferty thought only the
college-educated should have the vote.  Better guard against the arr I
gance of the martyred, she told herself.  Better guard against
ingratitude-but gratitude was so wearying it was like walking with a
limp, all the other emotions out of alignment.

There were no crises, at least not visibly.  Someone whose name,
according to his clipboard, was Monte Fitz had extended his hand to her,
then taken it back, said "Excuse me rather politely, and left her
station without saying why.  But when blood was about to be drawn there
could be many reasons.  She would not put herself and Jacob at the
center of everything.

She saw some heads incline toward one another and no one emerge from the
group to sit beside her, arm extended for the pressure cuff.

On the other hand, a decent number of women and some men who'd come over
from the piano factory in a group presented themselves with the look of
challenge on them.  She blushed.  Somehow they must have caucused on her
behalf; they seemed to have opted for a policy of decency.  "Hey, Dr.
Reiser," they tended to say.  "You doing all right?"

The women's variations were gentler; she even stopped feeling the need
to smile and nod at the question.  They were performing for their
neighbors.  She couldn't guess why they did it or what it cost them.

One dark young woman with a very fair baby on her back stood waiting to
speak to her.  She took all the space in front of Carolyn's table,
ostentatiously, flaunting her presence.  Carolyn dismissed the man she'd
been interviewing (who wanted to know if a trip to Tangiers put him on
the "no" list.  "Depends on what you were doing there," she told him
bluntly, smiling a little.  He didn't smile back).  The young woman
leaned down and delivered her message.  "I know Jacob and Jacob could
not do a thing like what they're saying he did.  I could tell them that
for you if you want."

"You're a friend of his?" she asked, a thoroughly stupid question.

"From-?"

"We used to-hang out together.  You know-go out, sort of?" Her baby
clutched at her hair and pulled it straight down, hard, the way you'd
signal a bus driver to stop.  She was just a girl, though that baby rode
between her shoulders.  Prohably a senior-dropped out to produce that
gorgeous angel-haired child.  Another girlfriend they hadn't known
about.  "He's a good, good person?" she insisted with the improvisatory
air of someone who had barely known him.  "And I want to wish you
strength." The word was capitalized-she took herself very seriously.
Carolyn, embarrassed, thanked her and asked her baby's name.

"Gypsy," she answered, unsmiling.  "She's a sixties baby, you know?

She's going to grow up free-like, no shoes and no haircuts and stuff?

I don't even think I'm going to send her to school, that's a trip I
wouldn't wish on anybody, let alone my own flesh and blood." She hitched
the baby up a little and turned away.  "Tell him hello from Deanna,
okay?

Tell him I love him.  Strength." She gave a V sign and Gypsy lunged for
her fingers with a happy gypsy shout.

Business was a little slow (though not, she noticed, for Rafferty and
Caldwell).  She closed her eyes for a minute behind her hand.  The
strain of feeling as if a tide of onlookers was standing just out of her
line of vision all the time exhausted her but she only felt it when she
stopped.  "Doctor, get a doctor over here!" she heard and pulled up out
of her daydream.

A large young man-she could see this as she approached at a run-had gone
under.  He had crumbled just as he'd stood up minus his pint of blood;
now he lay like a huge log between the frail white enamel legs of a
nurse's table.  This tended to happen mostly to men.

(Because women were used to the sight of blood?  Because men's macho
cool put a strain on them?  Who could say?) A couple of the male staff
carried him behind a screen and she went through the usual routine
-pressure, investigation of head and bones, smelling salts-while the
small tide of busy noise rolled on unabated outside.  Rafferty and
Caldwell had been turned back.  So she was a doctor after all, if only
in a pinch.

The young man, in the dark green uniform of a local oil company, was
frecKled and fleshy, and his eyes opening very slowly against the light
were starry wet.  She smiled at him without condescension.  He was only
a few years older than Jacob.  "You're okay.  You still feel dizzy?"

He closed his eyes again.  "Wheew, that's embarrassing."

Legion, she thought gratefully.  For emergencies, for time off.  For
despair.

At about two, Terry Taverner came in.  She was a small round woman who
seemed to be composed of a set of concentric circleseven her hair was a
series of small, tightly rolled curls.  Carolyn remembered her from the
bank where she'd worked for years, and then from-was it the Sears
catalogue store or the chicken fry?  Someplace where she stood behind a
counter, making change and small talk.  It was hard to associate her
with her sexy slender daughter, but then who knew what she'd looked like
before the terrible relaxation of marriage set in?  She was probably
younger than she seemed.  She wore a bright blue parka, belted, and
short boots trimmed with dead-looking fur; she had the uncharismatic
look of the average aging Hyland wife, not the stylish suburban kind,
but the true local, serviceable, a little tired, slightly hostile to any
glamour that wasn't sent by Hollywood and then, at the end of the
evening, safely withdrawn.  Though she was someone who would never have
found a way to be conspicuous had she not fallen victim, she seemed to
part the way, now, as she moved through the crowd-people made room for
her.  Rude as children, they stared from her to Carolyn, boldly, and
back again.  "Oh, watch out," somebody murmured, cruelly or kindly or
only voyeuristically.  Carolyn turned her face away.

When there was a lull in activity-people came to her in clumpsshe pushed
back her chair and walked out of the social hall to the ladies' room to
throw cool water on her face and be alone for a few minutes, to
unclench.  She was not surprised when she came out of her stall and
found Terry Tavemer washing her hands.  Carolyn saw her first in the
mirror, her smallish unsentimental eyes, her hair a drab toss of curls
like wood shavings.  Tragedy, she thought with a start, did not make
everyone look like Dame Judith Anderson.

Carolyn sighed.

Terry Taverner's eyes flared as if they were coals she'd blown on, and
then banked.

Carolyn's second sigh was not helpless but full of effort.  "Mrs.
Taverner?" She added the question mark for respect, for humility.

Martha's mother had still not turned to her.  It was very strange to
address the face in the mirror; it was like talking to a TV set.  Maybe
it gave the woman a feeling of distance; maybe even of not being there.

"I've wanted to come to talk to you."

She was going to get nothing back.

"Please," she found herself saying, though she wasn't sure what she was
asking for.  "This has been-for me, for us, too-the hardest time in our
whole lives.  I want to-" Her voice sounded too damn car I l.

Terry Taverner was looking at her scornfully, taking in the long white
uniform coat, the hair, in its blond rinse.  She had the tense, narrow
curls of a recent permanent.  Somehow, Carolyn thought, her own waves
had been opened up luxuriously, and their relaxation seemed to spell
money, fancy learning, a hundred immeasurables of ambition and
accomplishment.  "Advantages," people would call them who didn't have
them.  Hair could say that, though this wasn't the moment to rehearse
the reasons.  No room for history in this dim, fluorescent,
deodorant-tinged air.

"We're-we're probably going to lose our son," she said quietly, and hot
tears gathered in the corners of her eyes.  Could she really dare to
instruct this woman in their shared tragedy?  "I've spent a thousand
hours not sleeping, thinking about Martha.  I just want you to know.

It won't change things, but if you could-"

"What?" Mrs.  Taverner spoke her first words harshly.  "If I could
what?"

Carolyn shrugged.  "I don't know." She reached out for the frame of the
stall door and held it gratefully.  "If you could think of us as-" What?
"Human?  As parents-a family, I mean, who's also so-helpless?"

For a minute she thought Terry Taverner might nod, might even embrace
her, the way she'd dreamed this scene.  Absolution in the living room of
the Taverners' house was what she'd prayed for; she'd run it behind her
eyes a hundred times, shared tears, pooled grief, sweet reminiscence
(and then hadn't dared go ask for it).  But the woman stood for a minute
in total suspension and then said contemptuously, "What do you have to
be helpless about, you tell me that.  You made him who he is, nobody
else did it.  He's crazy and he's out walking the streets like a sane
person!" Mrs.  Tavemer had finally turned toward her and backed up
nearly to the wall where the paper towels hung in their silvery case, as
if Carolyn might be about to attack her.  "People keep telling us all
kinds of stuff your sweet little son used to do.  My husband thinks we
ought to sue you for all you're worth for not keeping that freak on a
leash."

Carolyn took the words like claw marks.  Her whole face stung.

What did she mean, what were people saying about Jacob?

She let Terry Taverner tell her again that she thought she owned the
world.  Fine, she owned the world-she listened with a small smile that
probably looked arrogant, but, like a mask, it held her firm against
disintegration.

"She was alive in the morning when I said goodbye to her.  You're a
doctor, you think about this, where she is now." She put her hand on her
stomach, which must hurt at the thought.  "You know, her friends went up
the cemetery, they put everything up there she loved-her music box is
there, and their pictures, they put the pictures right in with her, in
the coffin, all around.  They didn't even ask us, they just got her
makeup kit and her bracelets and a little gold dog with holes for all
her earrings, and planted them all around, it looks just like the top of
her dresser except there's snow on it.  But it isn't going to bring my
little girl back, and nothing you say's going to get any pity out of
me." She shook her head and tears flew off her face like rain.

Oh, the things your little girl did'.  Carolyn thought.  She didn't
deserve to be where she was-how could she be under the snow?  But your
little innocent had a life you can't imagine either.  And some of it you
knew.  Some of it the whole town knew.  "I'm not asking you for pity,
I'm saying-"

"You better take a good look at that kid of yours because he's going to
end up there, too.  They aren't going to let him get away with what he
did to her.  If we got to go to the Supreme Court, he won't get away
with it, and I'm going to cheer when they pull the lever.  You got a
nerve asking me for one single thing.  You saw that cross?  That's what
people think about you and your son.  You're just lucky my husband never
came up there to your place with a shotgun."

This all sounded so familiar that Carolyn didn't know if she had heard
it already in the back of her mind or if it was just cliche.  Movie
talk.  What could come out of this experience that hadn't been said
before?  The words surrounded her in a haze but they didn't touch her.
They echoed like the badly written lines in an old melodrama.

But surely this was no time for literary objections!  You shouldn't need
a good writer to talk about your grief, or make you ingratiating, or
easy to pity.  You are callous, she thought.  You are inhumane.  But no,
something would get through to her.  Not this but something would.

She was a hard case but she was not callous.  Callous people felt
nothing.  She felt some things.  Particular things, not predictable.
Please.

Something.

She was looking for a word to say that she could actually utter,
something that met her standards, but the door opened, amazing it hadn't
happened sooner, and two old ladies came in slowly, carrying their
coats.  They had identical blued hair and the sad segmented jaws of
ventriloquists' dummies, and Terry Taverner took the moment of
distraction to disappear without an exit line.  Carolyn, trembling,
lowered her face to the cold-water tap and when she had soaked it long
enough to shiver, she walked out herself and got her coat and went home.

Halloween.  Jacob must have been nine.  Maybe ten.  The yearly rituals
blended together, leaped out of order in her memory.  She didn't know
why this Halloween came back to her just then as she ducked behind the
wheel and started the car.  A tinge of fire smoke in the air?

Someone going by in a cape, yes, she saw the sweep of tweed out of the
corner of her eye, someone across the street headed for the library.

It was the year he won the contest-"Most Imaginative"-in the Town Hall
for his Sherlock Holmes costume.  (Any idea that got her out of the need
to run up a little fox on her sewing machine, or a simple horse complete
with movable ears and a feed bag, was a winner for her.  Later, bless
her, Annie Dineen took care of the task for Judith: she made fabulous
concoctions, elaborate, imaginative, daunting.  "It's okay, hon," Annie
would say cheerfully, pulling the pins out of the cancan dancer's hem,
piling up the fruit on Carmen Miranda's head.

"I couldn't get a medical degree, believe me.  Give me a cadaver to sew
up and I'm out of here.") So that year Jacob put on a voluminous
checkered cape Ben used to wear as a joke when he was an art student.
(He'd never thrown it away because he kept everything to use in his
sculptures-she used to tell people he kept his mother's salamis in the
safe-deposit box.) Jacob found a wonderful mahogany pipe with a perilous
swoop in it and a tremendous bowl in which he could have burned a whole
branch.

Somewhere he discovered a dark cap with earflaps and then all he needed
was a magnifying glass-that he borrowed from the Oxford English
Dictionary, which provided a good solid lens to help penetrate its
clotted pages.

The children had walked in a wide circle while their parents stood back
out of the way, a raggedy line of miniature animals and tangible
concepts-the Statue of Liberty, Recycling-some very serious, others
clowning and dancing.  The mothers who'd slaved over their twotone
jersey cats and beaded tutus were furious when Jacob won the judging.
They suggested that two prizes be given, one for "made" costumes and one
for "(merely) assembled." He was jubilant in victory.

"Brains!" he kept saying, and walked around in his idea of a spy's
urgent stoop.  "You don't have to make anything, you just have to be
clever."

Carolyn had wished the poor kids didn't have to compete.  A defeated
bride sobbed in a corner.  "When I came in here before, I thought I was
the most beautful!" Her mother looked as if she was going to cry with
her.  The little girl in the veil, with a train that kept getting
stepped on, was slight and blond and had tiny fidgety feet in white
ballet slippers-she could have been, might have been Martha.  She was
somebody's lovely little girl anyway, already learning the rudiments of
the upanddown contest between brains and beauty-somebody should have
assured her she'd get her own back eventually-about being chosen and
passed over, about the ways, sometimes, people ought not to be judged
but simply left alone to feel good.  After the march, the roomful of
kids ate doughnuts and bobbed for apples-it ought to have been enough.

They, Jacob and the rest of them, had always won too much.  Always, she,
Carolyn Miller, was the last child standing at the end of the spelling
bee, or Jacob prevailed in the Mathtasks contest, or Ben's painting, so
long ago, was chosen to hang in the school lobby, Judith's vaults took
first in the gymnastics competition, all of them hardworking but always
geared toward success.  Weren't there mothers back there behind the kids
who never made it, hissing "Unfair!  It's always the same ones!  We
protest!"?  None of it was given easily, but they knew how to take it-a
minority habit that, to go for it.  Even knowing how to work hard-it
added up to ease, the way some people's investments added up to riches.
And looked like privilege, somehow.  Terry Taverner staring at her,
small-eyed, in the bathroom mirror.  Her ,langhtersomehodys daughter-in
her miniature bridal gown, never beautzf'l enough.  Wasn't merit just
another privilege, if you didn't have it?

Judith was at the piano when she came in, sitting unnaturally straight.
All she did was pad across the keys making dissonance, very quiet, very
earnest and defiant.  Blocky chords made of impossible combinations,
pianissimo.  The notes rubbed up against each other and grated.  A
statement, a series of statements.

She tried to see the house the way Terry Taverner would see it.  It was
the informality, not the pretentiousness, of the furniture that would
bewilder and disgust her, and the arrangements of the pictures, so many
pictures, huge splats of color everywhere and not much of it
recognizable either: not people or scenery, the things paintings are
usually about.  As for knickknacks-did they, in fact, own anything you'd
call a knickknack?  The arty casualness, the refusal to invest in good
furniture except for the few antiques from a rough, not an elegant,
period (the blanket chest, the heavy corner cabinet, a dull battered
Puritan blue).  The worn Orientals.  The books.  Martha told Jacob that
only Jewish people had that many books.  And no gilded artifacts.  One
more proof of the wantonness of their class.  Show-offs.  Nonbelievers.

Judith made an ugly sweep up the keyboard and back down again, heavily,
with the side of her hand.

Carolyn wanted to go to her and say, "I will not fail you," but she
wasn't sure what the opposite of failure might be.

Maggie Dormer called, on behalf of some of the members of Carolyn's
chorus.  ("Informal, this is," she said firmly.  "This isn't official,
you understand.") The Curry Mountain Chorus was a mixed group, from a
couple of college girls all the way up through Dot Weyerhauser, who, at
eighty-two, still possessed a celestial, unwavering alto.  They were
passionate about Bach and Brahms and worked hard at their scales.  Last
year before the Christmas Cantata they even invited an exchange student
to help them with their German diction-but in general you didn't need a
pedigree to belong.  Carolyn sang alto, sometimes tenor if they needed
her.  These days she missed them terribly.

"We were thinking of having a sort of meeting," Maggie told Carolyn
vigorously, the way she urged the chorus to practice their parts at
home.  "I don't know if you want to come or not.  We're a little alarmed
by some of the I h, Carolyn, some of the talk has been-well, Henry
called it incendiary." (Henry, her husband, was a gentle man in spite of
a bass voice that was an alarming instrument in ordinary speech.) "And
now that they've done that horrible-" She couldn't say it.

"Truly incendiary." The group she had in mind appeared to include the
core of the town music lovers, who turned out enthusiastically for
chamber music in summer.  If you looked down on the concert crowd from
the balcony of the Meeting House, you saw a good bit of white hair, fine
labels, a whole inventory of Birkenstocks; a solid contingent, clearly,
from the Episcopal and Unitarian churches.

"Maggie," Carolyn had said.  "A meeting to do what?  How can you"We can
make sure there's some reason afoot out there.  Henry says, and I'm
afraid he's right-there's a lot of demonizing going on.

"But you're not going to change that." It felt peculiar to be arguing
for incivility.

"Look, dear.  Jacob hasn't had his day in court yet.  We can at least
remind people that you all deserve some consideration.  Some human
consideration." Carolyn thanked Maggie but said she didn't think they'd
come, though she was touched.  They'd be campaigning, she thought, if
they went.

Ben picked up the Bugler from the front step where the newsgirl had
thrown it with her admirable sidearm.  When he got to the Letters to the
Editor he spread it out on the table.  There were two letters about
them, one the petition they'd found nailed to the front door, the Edict,
Ben called it, pleading that Jacob's bail be rescinded, and signed
(though not on the page) by 493 members of the community.

The other deplored "terrorist tactics borrowed from the bad habits of
the most notorious extremists"-the act was unnamed-which, it said, were
a humiliating blot on the name of the town of Hyland.  "We live in a
democracy and the cost of democracy is that sometimes justice is slow in
its fulfillment, and even then may be full of surprises.  We cannot be
vigilantes who decide what the outcome should be and act upon it.  For
shame!" Carolyn heard Tony Berger's militant voice, and recognized that,
in addition to his wife, Celene, and Wendell and Steph, the four others
who had signed the letter were teachers in the district; they weren't
actually people she knew, but their names were familiar.  Most readers
of the paper, of course, would sooner side with the 493 "ordinary"
citizens than with the teachers, who might be suspected of driving
Volvos and having progressive ideas.  Though that wasn't fair: this was
not as simple as class.  She thought about Mock Frazier down at the Inn.
She thought of a dozen others, nice whitebread people, who had
proclaimed their decent skepticism.  God bless Tony anyhow, she thought.
He was no fair-weather friend.

And there was an editorial, too: "People are entitled to feel whatever
they need to feel after a horrific event like a murder," the editor
chided, "but it is the test of a state and a people that they can
overcome their passions and let justice take whatever course it may.
Brutal threats and scare tactics do nothing to restore a sense of peace
and order to our town at the very point when those are the things we
need most."

It was all so impersonal-every time anyone invoked Democracy, she wanted
to hit something.  Democracy the bitter medicine.  Democracy the
postponer of vicious blood gratification, the long, wearying process.

The name of the Accused was a hole in the language, a gaping silence.

Well, of course, better to make him faceless and emblematic than Jacob
Reiser with an address and a phone number, or out come the cross burners
and the finger pointers, true enough.  Terry Taverner would probably
agree with her, that was the funny part-she, too, would feel roughed up
by such abstraction every time it turned somebody's eyes away from
Martha, her particular girl, her flesh-and-blood child, gone.  Democracy
awaited all of them with its leveling touch.  Cold comfort.

Carolyn leaned her elbows on the spread I ut sheets and rested her head
on her palms.

One last try.  "You will not let him tell the truth and Panos can ask
for-"

"What can he ask for?  A short sentence?  Manslaughter?  A little
leniency around the edges?  You think this is a haircut-'Just take a
tiny bit off here, leave the rest alone'?"

She ignored him.  "Even-maybe-probation.  Maybe they'd let him go free
under some kind of psychiatric supervision.  If he told it just the way
he told us, how could you doubt him?  Sometimes if you tell your story
sympathetically enough-"

"Right.  That or twenty years.  He's got one life, Carolyn.  One hfe."

He said it like a threat.

"So did she, Ben.  Didn't she?" It seemed impossible that she could
manage to sound abject before both Terry Taverner and her husband.

"Just take the Fifth.  It's clean, it's legal, it's neutral.  You won't
be lying."

"The Fifth is about yourself.  What about when they ask about Jacob.

That's what's gotten you in trouble."

"You only know what you know, that's the point.  If you're silent, you
don't lie, you don't tell the truth.  You sit in the middle and wait.

Like Zen.  Stasis.  Perfection."

"You're going to be the Zen master of the Grieves County Jail."

He smiled and a tense peace radiated from his face.  "A Jewish Zen
master.  Well, I surely won't be the first."

Around ten o'clock, when she walked downstairs wrapped in her robe, Ben
was in the kitchen making English-muffin pizzas.  Jacob had his
home-tutoring notebook open, his elbows on the paper, eyes closed,
drowsing.  ("You could be on death row," he'd said, not amused, "waiting
for your last meal, and they'd still be drilling you on equations and
asking you to find Bosnia-Herzegovina on the goddamn map.") "Where's
Judith?"

Ben looked up from the cheese slicer innocently.  "Judith doesn't seem
to favor our company these days.  I think she's boycotting us."

He said this neutrally, which amounted, she thought, to smugness.

She shivered.  "Jake, put a little more wood in, will you?  I'm just out
of the shower." She sat down, angry.  "You haven't given any thought to
why that might be?"

Jacob had reached into the woodstove with the iron tongs to prod a piece
of wood that was hiding in a back comer.  All Carolyn could see was his
face and shoulders as he leaned in.  She saw his eyes widen before she
heard his howl.  He leaped back as if he'd been flung, and flailed his
arm in the air wildly, flaming like a flag.  "Jake!  Here!  Jake!"

Ben hurled himself at the arm and surrounded it with his chest, and
dragged him to the sink to plunge it under a burst of cold water.  Jacob
was gasping, "Ah!  Ah!  Ah!" as if in ecstasy.

She was up and tearing at the remains of his blackened sleeve, but she
couldn't tell if it was glued to his skin or only soaking wet.  "Break
off a piece of aloe," she commanded Ben, who ran to the windowsill and
cracked off a fat oozing end of the succulent plant, spiny and charmless
in its pot.  Carolyn had managed to push back the sleeve very carefully,
a centimeter at a time, to be sure it wasn't fused to Jacob's flesh. She
spread a huge slick of colorless grease on the blistering skin, trying
to keep her fingers light, and thought of the burning cross.

The threat, the warning.  Fire wanted him.

"We're going to the hospital," she said in a voice they couldn't argue
with.  "Let me get into some clothes.  This needs some real medication
fast." When she came downstairs, Jacob was in his jacket, his right arm
out, his face as white and damp as a cut potato.  "Oh, honey."

She ran her hand across his forehead.  "It'll feel a lot better soon, I
promise you." She put her arms around him, careful to stay away from the
burned side, then opened the front door onto a medicinal chill.

The Professional Building was dark except for the red lights that glowed
above the emergency exits like hot cinders.  When she turned the lock to
her office and switched on the light she felt as if she'd never left it.
The yellow-and-green flowered cushions in the waiting room looked a
little more worn than she'd ever noticed, and Karen-what a thoughtful
friend-had taken the plants out of their wicker holders to minister to
them at home.  Otherwise, it was Before, and she felt elation rise in
her like adrenaline.

"Okay, come on in here, let me get this cleaned up properly, and we'll
put some cooling stuff on it.  We've got to be careful about infection."
She bent over him her strenuous attention, and her fingers moved,
gratefully, to do what they understood so well, the fine balance of hand
and mind that she was lucky enough to live with.  "Wait a second." She
leaned into the comer where she kept a tape machineradio stocked with
children's music to distract the criers.  She clicked it to FM and
fiddled with the dial until she found some familiar rush of noise.
"Hammer, cool," Jacob said.  "Okay, leave it right there."

She worked at his arm, at the soft underside, slowly and carefully.

So many small innocent bodies had passed under her hands in here,
appendixes prodded, bones set, phlegmy chests listened to.  She held
Jacob in her sight, but her mind flooded: little boys with sheepdog
bangs and knobby shoulders, girls with curls softer than the cotton
balls in the jar.  Meek ones who gazed at her like spaniels, and feisty
ones, wrigglers, hysterics, kids who brought out words their mothers
didn't know they knew.  "Pediatricians have to have a sentimental
streak," her favorite professor, Timonelli, had told her once.  "I'm
shameless," he'd said, though he was a tough enough bastard with them.
"I'm not sure how I ever got past my own pacifier and security
blanket-just a fellow baby at heart, looking out for my own kind."

They loved to hear him say that; he was a hulking man with a large
pocked face, an inquisitive nose, and furiously tangled dark hair, about
as far from the tenderness of his baby self as any man they knew.  But
he could whisper.  "That's why you've got to be tough about what you do
with them.  No room for error with those kiddos.  Punish yourselves, so
they won't have to be punished."

The bandages were as clean as blank paper, though they wouldn't stay
that way ten minutes.  "Does it hurt?" she asked Jacob, and as he shook
his head-Still numb"-she saw again how honest-looking he was, how the
distance between his eyes, the set of his chin, all of it was
mysteriously spaced to make you trust him, such tiny increments of angle
and arrangement.  (Wasn't Mickey Mouse designed to look like a
baby-she'd read this somewhere-to make us go soft at the sight of him,
his head huge, his ears set low?  She seemed especially susceptible.)
Every child who'd been up on this examining table rumpling the paper,
kicking her feet, looking over his shoulder for his mother, alive and
needy-and the mother needy as the child-was watching her.  God, she
missed it!  The room was full of faces, hovering, a children's picture
where the faces hide in the trees, invisible.  Jacob was one child, only
one.  Martha was one, that little girl with visible ribs and tiny nubby
breasts, and the blondest eyebrows over cloudless blue eyes.  (How
sentimental can we be, Timonelli?  she pleaded.  Where do you draw the
line?) Judith was another one, just another child, neither better nor
worse than any other, nor more valuable or lesswhat did those words mean
before privilege set in?  Judith long-legged, fair but not fairy-blond
like Martha.  So many ways to be fair.  How Judith always shrieked when
her mother gave her a shot-she'd finally handed her on to whichever
nurse was working: let her hate the nurse instead.

Had Martha screamed at the moment of-impact, wasn't it?  Annihilation.
She saw Judith's fragile ear where it was lapped with short soft hair,
that ear she used to whisper into endlessly when Judith was little and
loved pretend secrets.  (Though what if she didn't have a Judith?  Could
she only feel for Martha because she had a similar girlchild, blond and
clinging?) Judith would hoist herself up to giggle into her mother's
ear, overcome with nothing to say, just the need to keep the game going.
And the incredibly smooth temple beside the ear, fragile as eggshell,
faintly lined with one blue thread.  Growing up is all a matter of
toughening, hardening from eggshell to leather.  And then softening
again, later.  Dissolving.  What is it for, she asked now -felt it,
didn't ask it in words.  Why save them, Timonelli?  Why keep them from
pain, after all?  How could she save one who was already gone?  What
could she give?

Well, it was indecent, maybe, to need a daughter to make her feel the
loss, but there it was-she did.  She had a daughter.  She had a son. All
she could do was give away his safety.

She could step out of the way and leave him out there in the open, to
the mercies of other people's parents.  He wouldn't be alone, his father
would be with him.  Judith would be with her, then.  There would be a
line between them, indelible.

She felt a sudden peculiar falling inside her, like dominoes tumbling
down, keeling over in a slow heap, inevitable.  Their collapse went on
for a long minute and then stopped, as if they'd come to the last,
they'd leaned against the bottom one and it gave and the whole fluid
collapse was finished.

It would be the end of them.  Wasn't Martha under the snow the end of
the Taverners?  Wouldn't this be worse?  Jacob smiled at her, finally
relieved, and gestured at his arm.  "Can I get out of doing my
schoolwork now?"

She took him into her own arms again, smiling back.  Once the motion in
her chest had stopped, she was cold, still, inside.  Finished.

I'm leaving you, she thought, my best darling boy, I'm abandoning you to
yourself.  It was facing-up time, and if he came through itbut she
couldn't get herself even to think the words, she was too dwarfed by the
size of it all-he wouldn't be her boy anymore, or his father's, either.
She had told Terry Taverner they were going to lose their son; she knew
the woman hadn't believed her.

It was as if he had thrown her to the ground and put his foot on her
chest and she had decided to stop fighting and try to lie still.  She
would close her eyes and let the snow fall on her face, and when it
melted, it would be tears.

Ben had not come with her.  She walked out of the grand jury room
straight to Panos.  He was sitting on the bench beside Mag, waiting,
popping his knuckles.  There were a few other people at the other end of
the hall, a very fat woman in turquoise and her snappy-looking lawyer,
deep in conversation.  Carolyn gestured to Panos and Mag to move and
they made room for her on the bench.

"How'd it go, trouper?" She imagined Panos kidding with his sons in a
house crammed with too much furniture, too many people, all of it
smelling like the kitchen.  He never liked to sound uptown.

She covered her mouth with her palm for a minute, as if that might keep
her from having to speak.  It was a habit Ben laughed at, as if main
force could keep the words in.  "Well, I guess I told them the truth."

Panos laughed.  "Thank God somebody's sane over here.  So he didn't
convince you to go belly-up alongside him.  Well, what can I say.

Good."

"That isn't what I mean.  I mean that Ben and Jacob haven't been telling
you the truth, Panos.  I can't believe you haven't known that."

The silence was thick.  He waited her out.

"There's a different-oh God, I don't know what you're going to do about
this, Panos."

"What I'm going to do.  Hmmh." He narrowed his eyes at her.  "Go on,
then," he said sternly.  "I don't like suspense." He sounded angry at
her, as if she was trying to be difficult.  He and Mag exchanged
impatient glances.

She was weak, her whole upper body was almost impossible to hold up.
"Can we talk about this somewhere else?  This is very hard, it sort
of-doesn't lend itself to, you know, hallway chat.  And here come the
guys."

The news photographers were bearing down on them.  She always had the
feeling they stood somewhere out of sight with their stop watches and
then, at a given moment, like an invading army, descended.  They hated
the secrecy of the grand jury but they could at least catch the retreat
of the principals, the more anguished the better.

Carolyn restrained herself.  Lights flared at her back.  They found a
deserted conference room, more plastic chairs, more fluorescencethe Law
seemed to proceed in a hard-edged world.  It was worse than the
hospital.

She told him Jacob's version, with intermissions for silence in which
she stifled tears.  (They had cried enough, all of them, she thought
irritably, and it changed not one damn thing.  But it took too much
energy to resist.)  She told him how Ben had made a few significant
changes, not very many, just enough.  "Did you really believe that
story?  Didn't it seem awfully-strange?" she asked him, but Panos only
grunted in reply.  "Keep going," he said.  "And the weapon?  That car
jack you said he used?  Do you know where it went to?"

"You don't want to hear."

"Maybe I need to."

"It won't surface, I promise you.  But I'm not going to say.

"Did you ever see it?"

She shook her head.

"Then it's hearsay.  Be grateful for small favors." Panos had broken out
into a sweat; his swarthy forehead looked like Ben's after a fourmile
run.  It was an accomplishment, she thought dimly, to have shaken Panos
Demaris so.

"You can't be forced to testify against your husband in a court of law.
Would it help you to know that?"

She smiled.  "Does that extend to discussions with your defense
attorney?"

"As you will.  I just don't want it coming back to haunt me and make me
look sloppy.  If you don't care what happens to you, I care what happens
to me.

She nodded.  "Fair enough." Then silence.

"Jesus." He looked, quite suddenly, exhausted.  "Do you realize
everything you said in there is indelible?  Do you know, roughly, what
that means?"

She nodded.  Very roughly.  She didn't know anything one way or the
other.

"You couldn't have consulted with me first?  God, you're just like he
is, you're independent operators, both of you.  I don't know what the
hell you're paying me for, if you want to know.  My counsel doesn't
exactly come cheap, but you don't ask, you don't discuss, the two of you
just call me in to clean up the messes you make." He looked a little
awed.  Mag just stared.  "Carolyn, I don't even know if I can stay on
this case now.  We've got a lot of hard thinking to do." The "we" meant
Panos and Mag; she had had all the say she was going to.

"What do you mean?" She saw that Mag's head was in her hands,
dramatically, as if this were her own calamity.  What did you buy of
these people, anyway?

He took the kind of deep breath, huge, she made patients take when she
was listening for rales.  "There are questions of ethics involved, my
friend, if you know your client's lying.  If he's asking you to sub
press what you know.  This is the kind of conundrum you just love, isn't
it?  'Do you have to believe your client's innocent?" "-he did that in a
mean, high, mocking voice.  "All that blah-blah of yours.  Well, now.
Look what you've done to bring it to a head.  If I know-"

"You don't know anything, Panos.  You weren't there.  And neither of us
has the first bit of proof, it's just our word, one-parent-against the
other.  You said before it was a lousy case for the prosecution and it
still is.  So it's a lousy case for the defense now, too."

Panos closed his eyes in exasperation.  "You're going to be out there by
yourself, Carolyn, if they want to keep their story.  If we're pleading
not guilty and you come in with manslaughter, sudden passion, whatever,
you'll be hung out there to dry all by yourself."

Mag had picked her head up and begun doodling savagely on a yellow pad.
Her obsessive circles, so thick they dented the paper, felt like a
fingernail on a blackboard.

"Or he will." She didn't feel as tough as she sounded.

"If I tell his story in there, I won't be there to help you.  You're
going over to the prosecution, you realize."

She supposed she did, without having thought of it that way.  "If you
accuse me of lying, then I look vindictive.  I look like a witchmother
trying to put my son in jail.  Will anybody believe I'd do that without
a reason?"

"Or crazy.  Don't forget crazy.  You could look nuts.  You could look
out to get your husband however you can-theres a reason, and not an
uncommon one either, you know.  Baby, if I say what I could say I can
make you look like Medea." He slashed his throat with his hand.

She was out of replies.  Let them call her crazy, then, small price.

Let them find Jacob sane and innocent, she'd have told what was true.

Medea?

"God, you're as stubborn as he is," Panos said without admiration.

"Oh, I'm worse." She contemplated the matter.  "Ben gets mad and he digs
in, he shouts a lot, but then he cools down fast, no grudges.

He gets it out of his system, and the stubbornness, too.  But me." She
thought about herself, locked up, her sense of propriety once she had
proof.  "Me, I do a slow burn but then I stay mad forever.  I never
thought about it, quite.  But I'm really not very forgiving, Panos.  Or
changeable." Her eyes filled at the truth of it.  "I'm-I've got a lock
on a lot of things.  Facts.  You can get to me with facts.  They set
hard as stone for me." Her sister used to tell her that every chance she
got.

Her sister flowed like water and she crystallized like rock.

"Your husband sounds very Greek to me.  Mediterranean.  Lots of quick
flare-ups and-ffft, the air is cleared.  Cleansed.  Thunderstorms.

We used to call my father Stormy.  My father put his foot down so hard
one time he smashed the front stoop in half.  My brother took a Polaroid
and gave it to him and he thought it was so funny he framed it." He
looked too hard at her.  "Did you tell Ben what you were going to do?"

"Not yet."

"You're going to?"

She laughed at the preposterousness of withholding it.  "I can't think
of a way not to."

"Christ," Panos said.  "All I can say is I hope he doesn't have his
son's temper or I'll worry about you."

That was probably meant to be black humor.  "Worry.  He doesn't have his
son's temper, his son has his." He had done the best he could with that
anger of his, she knew.  But what can you ask of a person but that he
know he has a problem, and then that he try to control it?  Hadn't he
hauled himself to therapists like someone with a painful invisible
illness, hadn't he done everything but stifle his mouth with a gag?
Well, was he responsible for what was left if he sometimes failed at it?
Or for what was forever perceptible under the surface?

Children tasted what their parents swallowed.

"I think Ben always expected the kids to be like him-you know, to get
it, sort of.  Not to feel threatened.  The way he'd flare up and then
die down fast.  Only they could never see anything except the anger
part.  But you know," she went on, contemplative.  "I may be worse for
them than he is.  A punisher isn't any better than a-a swatter who can
give you a smack and then laugh over it and hug you hard."

Was she romanticizing?  Or was it the combination that was lethal, his
leap of fury, her hasty, cauterizing constriction?  Both of them doing
the best they could do, but oil on water maybe.  Maybe Jacob was the
inevitable flame.  "Anyway," she said, returning with a little
embarrassed smile, "the point is, I did it.  In there.  It's done.  The
tale is told."

"What, exactly, did you tell them?"

She looked around, panicked.  The sign on the halfopen door said Jury
Room.  This was where they'd sit, or one just like it, small and plain,
lit only by their own concentration.  "Mag, do you think you could find
me a soda in one of those machines out there?  Anything at all, just wet
and cold." She reached into her bag for some change.

How many diversions would she need to keep from breaking down?

She would pinch herself raw before she would break down like a child in
here.

Mag rose slowly, obediently.  She didn't take the quarters.  "That's
okay, we'll put it on the bill."

"You're stalling," Panos told her.

"The whole confession he made."

"Admission.  That wasn't a confession.  Okay.  How much of it?"

"Everything, I said."

"Pregnancy?"

"I told you, everything."

"So you even gave them a terrific motive.  You ever read that American
Tragedy book?  About the guy and the girl and the rowboat?"

"But this wasn't his, he isn't-wasn't-"

"Jealousy, then.  Just as good.  Superb, even.  What did you think you'd
accomplish for Jacob, handing them such a good reason on a goddamn
platter?"

Mag put a Diet Coke in front of her, its cold sides glistening.

"But what really happened-"

"Carolyn, screw what really happened!  What's it going to take for you
to get this?  'The truth' in a courtroom is just a construction of
effects.  It's theater.  There is no such thing as simple truth, as long
as its presentation can be shaped, or perverted, or invented, even.  Not
the facts, mind you.  I'm talking presentation.  Either side can skew
the way things appear, and how they appear is all that matters."

"You're describing public relations.  You're describing an ad campaign."

"Correct.  I am." He took a swig of her soda and made a face.  "God, it
leaves wax in your mouth.  My tongue feels like the goddamn kitchen
floor." He wiped his lips with the back of his hand.  "This means we
have a bunch of different elements to play with-Jacob's personality, if
he testifies.  Your husband's attitude if we can get him to condescend
to speak about his beloved son in public.  The girl's reputation, which
will not, I guarantee you, for all your Girl Scout theatrics to redress
and do penance and all that-will not survive this trial.  A girl, no
matter how innocent-looking, who's screwing one guy and having some
other guy's kid is not made for sainthood in a courtroom, I can promise
you that if I promise no other thing." He looked hard at her.  "Don't
crumble on me, Carolyn.  You've done what you've done and you're going
to see out the consequences of it.  'He's so crude." I can hear you
going home and saying that to Ben.  'Oh, he's so gross, he hasn't got a
single compassionate cell in his body."" He got up and skulked around
the table.  "Shit, Carolyn.  I don't want to see your kid con victed,
but if you wanted to make my job impossible, you did a terrific opening
number." He danced a little soft-shoe.  "Applause from the D.A.  He
ought to send you roses."

She sat perfectly still, taking the assault.  This was why she hadn't
come to him first.  "It's absolute, Panos, why I did this.  That's why I
didn't come asking your permission.  I didn't want it.  This isn't one
of your courtroom strategies." She had told Judith there were no
absolutes at her age, that they were a luxury.  There seemed to be no
one she hadn't lied to.

He laughed.  "Oh, tell me about it.  You and your wildcatter husband.

You and your saintly goddamn absolutes.  I want to tell you, you're more
selfish than you can begin to realize, both of you.  You'll see what a
bare little thing your principles are.  You want him to face the
consequences, he'll have a few to face and then some.  And it'll be too
late to call back a single word."

Driving home alone, around the lake, past the old graveyard, out into
the open stretches of straight road, she felt her eyes mist over.  It
was hard to see, caught in such a downpour of anger.  Now Panos was
furious, too, though his fury was rational and contained and she
couldn't blame him for it-the man was doing his duty.  Nobody spared
her, though.  Was it inherited or learned, what Ben and Jacob had in
common?  There seemed to be a genetic disposition to so many
incalculable things-hyperactivity, they were learning.  Short attention
span.  Shyness.  Why not wrath?  Choler, centuries ago when they thought
it was a physical quality.

She tended to think of Jacob cowed by his father, shouting back, or
holding on in strained silence but terrified at the quick.  Ben towering
over Jacob, though it had been years since he could do that: they were
eye to eye now.  Saw Ben's captive creature.  Father and son, she could
imagine them, tearing at something that looked like a huge fruit that
they held between them, veined and fleshy, running with juices.  They
were sharing it, eating from opposite sides, but it never seemed to get
any smaller.  She had seen them that way, she realized, after one of
their conflagrations, head-to-head, a ceremony of rage over some petty
infraction.  What was it-oh, Jacob had borrowed a sweatshirt, Ben's
favorite, it was from the Boston Museum, a Matisse on the front and
someone else on the back, Braque maybe-and had ruined it, stained it or
ripped it or something.  Nothing.  After an evening of watching them,
hearing them, she had seen them in her sleep, eating that fruit.

It had stayed with her all day, sickening as a rancid taste in the
mouth.

What a peculiar image it was: two children with their faces smeared, and
she the irritated mother coming after them with a wet washrag, coming at
them like a witch, a hag breaking in on their pleasure, and both of them
shrieking.

"Wait here," I said to her.  "You wait right here."

And I went to get him.  I had to pull him, objecting, out of his bed,
where he was lying in the dark with his bandaged arm out of the blankets
and that endless music on, the screeching and wailing of boys looking
for trouble.  "Come hear what your mother's done," I said.

"She's done it, boy, and it isn't going to come undone." I pulled him
down the cold hall toward our room, his hand inside mine, pulling back,
trying to tear away.  The windows were so steamed up with the cold there
seemed to be smoke billowing outside.

She testified in the morning and then she vanished.  God knows where she
went; I never did find out.  I made supper for the kids and wondered if
I ought to report her missing.  There is catastrophe, even if it would
seem like a bad joke today.  People drive off the road into Derby Lake.
They get sick without warning.  They even get murdered.

But she came in around ten and didn't look at us and went to bed.

I followed her up the stairs and waited while she undressed in the
bathroom-first time since I've known her.  And then I had to hear it.

I was afraid of this.  I didn't trust her, I thought it, every time she
sat there at the table nursing a mood, she was getting herself ready for
this.  She never wanted to save him.  From the very first minute when I
saw the way her hands opened and closed, opened and closed as the words
sank in, she was never going to forgive him.

"Tell him," I said.  I stood in the doorway but I pushed him into the
bedroom so that he was out in the middle of the floor like an animal.  I
had both of them terrified, trembling, but it was her own doing.  You
have a choice in these matters.  Whatever's handed you, goddamn it, you
can shape it at least a little bit.  You can try.

"Because she was a person, too," she said, as if the rest should be
self-evident.  "That's all.  I love you and want to protect you, but her
parents loved her and wanted to protect her, too." She was crying as she
said this, very quietly and evenly like a rhythm under the words, and
the more she cried the more I wanted to shake her, to get her to face
what she was doing to us.  "Do you think your life is the only one
that's ruined?  Ben?  Sometimes you act like Martha's parents are just
-an irritation.  An inconvenience.  And Martha-" She flung her hands out
in a parody of impatience.  It wasn't fair to be simplified that way.

Jacob just stood and took it in.  He didn't even frown, his face was
perfectly still.  What do you think when the mother who gave you life
puts her hands around your neck and squeezes?  Children are abandoned at
so many different points along the way, from birth onward.

But a baby, you know, is only a theoretical person.  When he's rejected
it isn't really rejection, it's only circumstances, his mother's life
can't take him in and hold him.  A million reasons but they're not his
reason, they're not his fault, they're not him.  Carolyn was given away
like that, but I don't think she's ever felt discarded.  But what is
Jacob thinking standing there, whose whole self, everything he's been
for seventeen years, everything, isn't enough to make him valuable?  She
knows him better than anyone but she will not save him.

"Every tug of the rope," she said with her eyes closed, "made me more
sure I had to do this.  Benny, you'd do well to stop.  When you get me
to remember him as my baby, my boy, my darling, that only tightens the
other end, why don't you understand that?  Martha was their baby, their
girl, their darling.  Don't you hear me?"

"Why don't you let her parents worry about her.  Are they worrying about
him?"

Jacob looked from one of us to the other.

She pulled into herself like a turtle.  I watched her shrink up, her
legs pulled under her, her shoulders folded in somehow.  "Jacob," she
said.  I had to strain to hear her.  "Jacob, can you understand that at
all?"

"You're asking a hell of a lot of him," I objected, "if you expect your
own kid to understand that you betrayed him.  You meanforgive?"

"It's not betraying, Dad," my son said to me.  "I sort of know what she
means.  Why did he look as if he was afraid of me?  Both of them stared
as if I were the criminal here.  "What if somebody did that to me?
Accident or not." He shrugged as if it was simple.  "I don't think
that's-I can understand that.  Everybody needs defending.  Marthait's
too late, but I can see that.  Martha could use some defending."

His eyes were wet.  They were the color of a certain kind of rock I
love; wet, they were deeper blue-gray, the way the stones at the pond
get dark when you splash them.  Those beautiful eyes, neither hers nor
mine.

She got off the bed and put her arms around him and he laid his head on
her shoulder the way he did when he was half his age.  He was comforting
her.  I went weak in the knees, I was seeing the grand jury ranged
around in that empty room, its eyes on me, the unforgiving women with
their steely-gray hair, steely eyes, flinty souls that I swear have
never dared a moment's honest fury, the righteous young housewife with
her little smile of amiable doubt, the man who twitched his keys as he
spoke to me, a nervous twitch like sleigh bells in the distance, he
flicked them with his thumb.  The very round man, banded with fat lines
like a baby, who asked me some nasty questions about the car, clever
questions, smiling the whole time.  "The Fifth Amendment is for
criminals," he said, and the man from the D.A."s office told him he
couldn't say that.  "No comments, please.  No intimidation.  This is a
fact-finding body while Mr.  Reiser's in here.  You can talk about what
you think later." Fact-finding maybe, but they didn't find any on me.
None.  "I'm looking for intent," the fat man said.  "I want to find
intent." He didn't know what he was talking about.  "Fine," said the
D.A.  "You look as hard as you want to for whatever you like, but you do
it with the facts.  Please." My wife went to those people and gave him
to them.  Just handed him over.

"Are you asking to be punished?" I asked Jacob.  "Is that what you think
you deserve?" Jesus, punishment enough by now, everybody's lives in
shards at our feet.  What more does he have to give?

No answer from him, but Carolyn said, "All right, Ben," with a
long-suffering kind of patience I found deeply insulting.  "I understand
why you did what you did.  Believe me, I do." This felt like a sop, to
keep me at bay.  "But I'm not talking about the way you see this.  I'm
talking about the way I see it." They closed ranks again, her arms tight
around his narrow back.  He was limp, struggled over this way.

"Jacob, Jacob," I heard her say-she was wearing one of those sexless
sack nightgowns, the Granny kind, that was a whole wide meadow of
daisies, orange and yellow.  "How could I have doubted you for a minute?
Who did I think you were?"

In some parts of Houston the traffic rages and snarls and really gives
the city a bad name.  The freeways flow like lava rushing down a
mountainside night and day.  You know that if you stop in front of them
you'll be buried.  One corner, two ordinary streets right in front of
the Galleria, where the whole world shops, has so many lanes and green
turning arrows appearing and vanishing that I think it would be easier
to walk across the ocean than navigate from one side of the street to
the other on foot.

But there are gentler places.  We live on a quiet green street.  We have
a yard where our cat hassles the squirrels in peace and sits on the
fence in the sun.  We grow eggplants and arugula and better tomatoes
than we did in New Hampshire.  But the zucchini won't live -impossible
to imagine, since we never used to be able to give them away fast
enough.  Something lethal gets them here and makes them rot in the buggy
hard-sweating air of early summer, or there aren't enough bees to
communicate between the plants and spread what my father calls their
sexual honey.

Sometimes I sit in the yard under a giant lacy pecan tree reading a
book, and I feel myself being happy and I don't know what to do.  A long
time ago we were sentenced to sadness, my family, and so when I remember
I am eaten up with what is left of guilt.  I think I may have to pay for
this later, when I've stopped remembering altogether.

My mother says I am paying for it now.  She accuses me of keeping my
distance from everyone and everything.  I do, but I think I would, no
matter what.  Boys have always been disgusting, nothing new in that.
They have their uses, but up close they're all still babies-me!

me!  me!-and they have a wicked grasp.  The ones who aren't dangerous
are ridiculous.  They do me the greatest favor by keeping at a distance.
And friends-I never had a lot of friends at one time, and I never will.
And I found that the ones you have-my best friend was Celeste Charters,
who was fun when I was much younger and it wasn't so hard to understand
me-they can't follow you into your deepest trouble and help when things
get complicated.  Nobody can, much.

My own mother ought to know me that well, at least.  I think I am just
like her-she was never what you'd call sloppy with feeling.  Not to the
eye, at least.

My brother, Jacob, too.  I think I shy away from him a little, in case
he does anything strange.  Not that I expect him to hurt me, I can't
imagine that.  I'm not sure I can say what I expect.  But I treat him a
little too politely, like-I don't know, a visitor, I guess.  One of
those exchange students you don't want to offend because you don't know
the customs of their country.

And worse, how is he supposed to trust anyone when he can't trust
himself.  If I were Jacob I'd be afraid of breaking things that had
gotten into my hands.  Then I'd be afraid of not coming clean.  And he's
like my father there.

Nobody comes clean much in this world, I've decided that.  Everybody
slips and slides around each other once you start looking at them hard,
and they get what they want if they're good enough at it.  I can see how
my family, although I love them, is a mess of threats and surrenders and
regrets and things they won't say to each other, and maybe they always
were.  My family and half the kids I know, their families, too.

But here's the thing: we are in this other place now, this city that is
larger than the whole state I was born in, a few times larger-and you
may believe it or not believe it but the whole question for all of us in
this different place, when we first came, was what matters and what does
not matter, and who we were and who we are now, today.

As time goes on, even those questions have mostly dropped away
you'd have to be obsessed to keep going on about them here.  We are who
we have become, and that's all there is to say about it.

When I first started school in Houston I didn't think I should hide it.
Why did you move here?  someone would ask me innocently.  Mostly I
wouldn't say, but finally, if somebody was getting to be a really good
friend, I would answer, Well, you see, my brother killed somebody -and
I'd get a strong stare and a long silence and then they'd say a word or
two to show surprise or else they'd change the subject im mediately,
before that could even register.  I was going to an "arts" high school
for my dancing that gathered up what my father called "odd lots and
broken sizes"-not only kids who were talented but those who couldn't fit
into the sane, square, ordinary schools.  Together we made a lot of
noise and color-you could call us dramatic-and I suppose that kind of
place can absorb a lot of irregularity.

Everyone seemed to come from a colorful family in which something
crucial had gone wrong: there were ordinary divorces, but there were
also more complicated ones.  For example: My friend Mark's father became
a woman, no joke, and when she came to see him star in Amadeus he
introduced her as his "second mother." She-he?-was a tall, big-boned
woman, but very good-looking, with dramatically flared cheekbones and a
smooth chest showing above the top button of her blouse.  Only her voice
seemed to come from the old history she was trying to change.  Her voice
was too deep even to be sultry and it came as a nasty shock.  But Mark
seemed less upset than you might imagine.

I don't know what he went through getting there, but when he introduced
her to us it didn't show.  Also, a girl I don't know, in the art
department, had her whole family kidnapped off a boat in the Gulf of
Mexico, somehow because of drugs, and she hasn't heard a word from them
for about three months.  The F.B.I.  is looking for them.  Imagine.

So you can see that I didn't really get very much attention from anyone
when I unveiled my own secret.

I personally found this a relief because, frankly, for years no one
thought much about anything in our family except my brother, and I had
come to the point where the whole thing was very-well, it was unreal.
That's the best way I can describe it.  I got to where I wasn't sure I
believed anything had happened, the way a word stops making sense if you
say it too often.  And in a way I felt bad about that.  You feel
terrible, even while you're relieved, when you stop thinking about the
dead.  But probably, to be honest, even Martha's parents will come to a
point someday where they don't think about her all the time, and then
they'll feel awful, as if they've failed her.

My father, for example, went to jail for about six months because he
would not testify against Jacob to the grand jury.  They put him in the
county jail, but it wasn't exactly what it sounds like, it was this
little cinder-block building in the middle of the cornfields.  Just
below it was a lovely arched stone bridge over a narrow brook, or maybe
it was even a small river, that sounded like a person breathing hard.  I
guess they couldn't hear it inside because the windows were so totally
sealed.  But they could see it.  It was a very strange and peaceful
place for a jail.  The first time I went to see him, I remember, by the
time his appeals had gone from one court to another, up and up, and he
finally lost, it was late summer.  He and my mother had not said a
single word-not one-since the day she talked to the grand jury.

Later, in the trial, of course, she did the same thing, and so did I,
and all of it was in the newspapers and even on TV, they couldn't get
enough of the "Family Feud." But by then I was used to it.

My mother said it was pride on both sides, but neither one of them would
move out of the house, they just planned never to be in the same room at
the same time.  This could get pretty ridiculous sometimes, like the
kind of play where people keep opening up the door on the person they
least want to see, but mostly it proved to me that you could get used to
anything in this world.  Frankly, I had nothing I wanted to say to my
father, either.  I thought he loved Jacob too much and everyone
else-everyone and Truth with a capital T-too little.  I kept wanting to
ask him why he cared so little about what happened to me while he
twisted up reality for my brother.  But I was afraid to ask.

And sometimes I wasn't even sure if what he did was the best thing for
Jacob.  I would have said, No lies for me, thank you, and let them
punish me in return for feeling clean and honest.  At least I think I
would, to the best of my ability to know.  Jacob never said a word (not
that I would have asked him).  On this score, he's like an amnesia
victim.  But we don't talk much these days about anything except things
that don't mean much to either one of us.

Strangely, after a while I wasn't angry at Jacob anymore.  At least I
don't think I was-he was too sad now.  That was how he paid.  I could
see that he was still a kid, sort of.  At least not an adult.  More like
someone who stops growing.  And I almost thought there was a little
something the matter with him-he had had a terrible shock and it was
like I could excuse him if all his "moral faculties weren t quite
working.  (That's what the prosecutor called them in the trial-it took a
little figuring out what he meant, believe me.  I had some questions
about his moral faculties before the shock, but they always stayed
questions.)  The thing is, I expected more of my father.  My father
chose.

Of course, when it came time for me to go visit my dad, my mother
wouldn't help, so it was my brother who drove me down.  By then I was
thinking in headlines, we were like a show-business family, and this one
was too bizarre: ACCU5ED MURDERER DRIVE5 515 T0 V15IT JAILED FATHER!  I
had gotten to where I translated everything into that breathless
nonsensical shorthand: E1LLER TEEN's 515TER HA5 TR0UBLE CoNCENTRATING,
HAND5 IN H0ME I 0RE LATE; RECE1VE5 11R5T F.

RE15ER 515TER F1GIIT5 0FF cLAssMATE, 1NJURE5 ATTACEER IN PLAYGR0UND
scuFFLE.

ALLEGED MURDER I;IN REI'oRT5 L0CEER vANDALIsM; D00R sMAsHED, BEL0NG1NG5
SCATTERED.

One of the things that kept me going when people were being mean to me
was that this friend of the family-of my mother's, reallyAnnie Dineen,
kept saying, "If you can get through this, you'll be very strong," and
"This will make you ironclad." Though I'm not so sure ironclad is
exactly what I had in mind for myself.  But I hung on, put my head down
and let them do what they wanted with me.  The I went somewhere else, is
what I mean.  Don't ask me where.  Inside, I guess, out of sight.

So Jacob the killer teen drove me to the jail, into the hills north of
Howe, down the most shadowy curving roads.  He sat outside sleeping in
the car-he slept a lot those days, that was probably the only time he
didn't have to remember that he had a murder trial ahead of him -while I
went in, because he was under indictment and you lose a lot of rights
that way.  Visiting a jail is one of them, but just as well, I think.
You don't have to rush things, and it might be your future in there.  To
make things even weirder, of course, I didn't particularly want to see
my dad, and I suspected he didn't want to see me.  But, even though we
didn't speak at home, there we were and there was this horrible glass
between us.  That just broke me up.  Right up the road from God's sweet
green fields I was staring through this glass full of the fingerprints
of total strangers, other sad families who spread out their fingers in
desperation, and I was supposed to whisper to him by telephone!  That
was when it began to be very hard to feel how the awful thing that Jacob
did one winter day could lead to this.  I thought, I don't understand
anything about what people do or why or how they deserve to be made to
pay for it.  Are there criminals, or criminals' loved ones, who can keep
all the cause and effect together in their heads and suffer when they're
supposed to be suffering, and then feel thoroughly punished, the way you
feel clean after a hard shower, and go home pure, and "put it behind
them"?

My father was brought out to me with these much rougher-looking men, or
at least poorer-looking.  (They had done things, he told me, like pass
bad checks, beat people up, steal cars, nothing that serious.

But one had supposedly abused a very little child, not his own but his
girlfriend's, had flung it against a wall and burned it with a cigarette
and maybe even sexually molested it.  I never saw him, they had him in
separate confinement for his own protection.)  My father's beard was
gone, his hair was cut like a marine, he was wearing sloppy gray sort of
pajama things, and-this was what got to me the worst, I think, even more
than the beard, which was hard enough because I don't think I had ever
seen his bare face, his chin and the soft places around his mouth and
neck and all-but he had on one of those bracelets they attach to your
wrist in the hospital, like he was a piece of something anonymous in a
warehouse and they had to keep track of him officially.

Like, asking him his name would hardly be reliable, they had to staple
it on so it could only be cut off by some special tool they have.  My
father inventoried like a dress that could get stolen except for the
plastic tag.  They had every inch of the place under surveillance-you
could see the little blue TV screens in this sort of war room, and you
kept hearing heavy doors buzzing open and closing, opening and closing.

All of it was too much for me, I could only cry and cry.  I felt like a
baby.  At one point the guard (who wasn't too thrilled having a kid in
there in the first place, without "adult supervision") almost put me
out, but I made myself stop for a minute till he left me alone.  Annie
Dineen was right, I was getting tough.

About my father: I didn't approve of what he did, not so much the
keeping quiet that got him put in here for "contempt," but making up
that lie that his jailers didn't even know anything about, to cover up
Jacob's actions, and his own, too.  But this was unfair.  This was
inhuman.  He deserved more dignity than pajamas and a computerized ID.
He looked like someone else entirely without his beard, and young.

Or sort of young and old both, a little lined and tired, but much less
forceful, less-aggressive.  The skin that hadn't been seen in the light
for, I don't know, maybe twenty years, was so pale, like a girl's, and
fragile-looking.  I wished I could put my arms around my father.  (Later
I could, he graduated to what they called "contact" visits, and he was
allowed to work on the prison farm, which he liked a lot.  He got dirt
under his nails pulling carrots and onions, and he managed to work on
some of the farm machinery because he was good at that kind of
tinkering.  His new skin turned red, then tanned and hardened up and
pretty soon he didn't look so much like a punished dog.)  It wasn't so
bad, really, it was like a regular job, only you couldn't come home at
night to sleep.  Somehow it looked to me as if they all got used to
being there together.  People adapt, he told me.  They make the best of
it.

Some of them I like a lot, he said.  They've learned the wrong way to
solve their problems maybe, but some of them are pretty bright a few
layers down, and they're greater menaces to themselves than to anyone
else.

When I came home my mother wouldn't ask a word about our visits, but I
always told her anyway.  I said, "Please, Mom, start figuring out how
you're going to forgive him when he comes home, he's so lonely."

He didn't even have Jacob to talk to, the Jacob he was in jail for.

Because I was only a teenager and we're supposed to be completely
unyielding, I think she expected more stubbornness out of me, and maybe
more anger than forgiveness.  But it made me sort of humble -I could
almost understand how he had worked his way to his perjury for Jacob.
Crimes of too much love couldn't be the same as crimes of indifference
or hard-heartedness-I think that's how my mother finally came around.
Someone-a rabbi in Buffalo-wrote to us and said, number one, when Jonah
was angry at God for killing the little gourd plant that gave him shade
in the desert-this was after he finished with the whale and ended up
parched instead!  -God told him he had no right to he angry: You didn't
raise it and love it as I did, He said.

Meaning, I think, you can't pass judgment on what I feel like.  No one
can know what love and caring feel like to anyone else, and what lengths
they will go to for that love.  And two, he told my father that Jewish
law lets parents keep silent against their children.  The law of your
country is what you have to obey in the end, he said, but, "Mr. Reiser,"
he wrote him very respectfully, "you should know your impulse is a
natural one that is sanctified by thousands of years of spiritual
decency." He didn't say anything to my mother about justice or loving
someone else's child as your own.  I thought he should have mentioned
that and praised her, too.

Anyway, no matter what happened, even if I disagreed with him, my father
was my father, and I had been loving him all my life.  It wasn't
possible for me not to care about him.  Is this good, is it bad?

Whatever the answer, I don't see quite as much choice in the matter as I
thought there was.

And my father taught me his favorite word that year while he was still
in county jail-irony.  It was a little hard to get your hands on what it
meant, and when it was exactly right to use it, but still I had a lot of
chances to think about it and try to apply it right, and it also came in
handy when I was reading.  First of all, I think I just liked the sound
of the word, the way it sort of flowed over your tongue like something
wet.  But better, the whole idea of it was useful because you could see
how often two opposite things seemed to be happening at once, or two
feelings needed to be held at the same time, but they were in conflict
with each other, or worse, they were both right!  It was better than
weird or confusing or any other word I could think of.

I thought, if irony was water, we'd be drowning in it.  If irony was
food, we'd never be hungry again.

What we went through while the lawyers' files got thicker and thicker,
and the rumors of interviews all around town thickened up also-our
lawyer Mr.  Demaris tried to talk to them, but they all said n I was
waiting more than a year for a trial.  But maybe that was just as well:
everyone's anger wore out.  I think that's what happened, anyway-our own
attitudes just softened up.  If you're at all sensitiv I , you can't
stay stiff with fury forever.  My father came home from the county jail
to see that Jacob and my mother weren't at each other's throats, that
Jacob refused to see her as his great Betrayer.  When my father was
gone, whether I like to say it or not, it was actually easier to spend
time talking.  Everything shifts around a little when someone's missing.
It isn't that you fill up the hole, but you rearrange yourselves, sort
of.  Plus, all of us were together more than we'd been in the past,
because there was this chill, you know, almost everywhere else besides
home.  (That's a good irony: to be punished by loneliness and to turn to
each other almost gladly.)  Because Jacob was not exactly safe in the
streets of Hyland.  When people have burned a cross on your lawn and
shouted nasty words at you in the street, you don't tend to want to hang
out all over town, eating pizza and strolling down Main Street like Mr.
Teenage New Hampshire.  Someone wrote/ailbird on the side of the car in
yellow paint when it was parked at the A & P and when we got it off you
could see where it had taken a little of the paint with it, there was a
ghostly word on the fender that will probably be there forever.

Mother finally began volunteering some time at a clinic in Howe under
another name.  That was the price of her free service, she told them-she
could work as Dr.  Joanna Miller (her middle name and her maiden name)
and no one would say a single word about who she was.

But it hurt me to see her-she almost went in disguise, so that she
wouldn't be recognized from those "Family Feud" stories in the papers.

She wore her hair in a prissy bun, the kind you can stick a pencil in,
and she got these big headlight glasses.  (She even considered dyeing
her hair brown, but I pleaded with her not to, and I guess she was
relieved when I convinced her that was going too far.)  But she said it
was worth it to work even if she had trouble answering to her own name.
I only hoped no one would "unmask" her; that would have been a horrible
way to reward her for putting in long days with sick children for no pay
at all.

The first day she went to work I thought, What has happened to my hfe?
It was almost funny-first my father has most of his hair taken away from
him, like Samson, and now my mother is becoming someone else I can
hardly recognize, right before my eyes!  This was the moment, I thought,
for me to put on a really short leather skirt and a tight sweater and
try to become somebody else myself.  If I wanted to, this was the time.
But all I could manage was longer, looser clothes that hid every bit of
me, and boots to meet my skirt hems, plus as much neglect of my hair as
I could get away with-I stopped cutting it, it just got sloppier and
grimmer-looking by the day.  We were all in hiding one way or the other,
and the worst of it was that all we wished was that we could go to sleep
and wake up on the other side of IT.  The trial was IT, everything was
Before or After IT, when our real lives might begin again.  Or might
not.  But at least we'd know.

The trial took place in a town called Savoy, as far from Hyland as they
could get and still be in the same jurisdiction, because our lawyer, Mr.
Demaris, proved that Jacob couldn't get a fair hearing where everyone
was so sure what had happened and threatened him left and right.  We
stayed in a motel where we played a lot of cards at night for want of
anyplace else to go; a policewoman sat outside our room just in case.
"There are these ad hoc revenge seekers," Mr.  Demaris explained, "and
it never hurts to be prudent." He talked that way.  He made me smile.

During the day we pretty much played out our old parts even though by
now we were a little different from what we had been at the beginning.
There was "the accusing mother,"

"the denying father"Daddy was not refusing this time, he said he'd made
his point and now it was time to get Jacob his freedom, but he managed
somehow to make himself very wimpy and uninteresting, so that people
must have wondered "What was the big deal?" about testifying in the
first place.  And there was "the hushed and respectful son" in one more
disguise, a new gray suit with a striped tie.  (When we were alone he
liked to hold the tie up over his head like a noose and stick his tongue
out and bug out his eyes, and I was supposed to shriek and say, "Jacob,
they'll see you!" But I wouldn't do that anymore.  I'm not sure my sense
of humor was improved by any of this.)  I suppose this isn't
unusual-Jacob on the witness stand was also incredibly bland.  Just pure
vanilla.  He and Daddy must have practiced being dweebs together.  It
was like, you put on the suit, the uniform of decency, and all your
weird and special intenseness-whoosh!-gets wiped away.

Otherwise, you'll scare people and they'll believe the worst.

And I was supposed to wear this large white collar, I guess to make me
look too young to lie-and I got to say 'Yes" eight times and "No"
fourteen, and then repeat, in mincing little baby-steps, question and
answer, question and answer, what I remembered Jacob told us.  It's a
very tiring way to tell a story.  Also, as it turns out, it isn't like
the movies, the witness stand is not a place where you'd want to tell
much of a new story, anyway.  The tension in the courtroom is terrible,
like a stage only worse, your heart beats fast from the minute you get
near it, and you don't want to forget your lines or say anything that
hasn't been planned.  I practiced in front of the mirror.  Mother
wouldn't help.

She said, "You don't need a drama coach.  Just say what happened.

Be fresh and simple-and don't forget, you're not trying to convict him!"
But you have to remember that all of us were witnesses, except for
Jacob, who was the only one who was allowed to sit there through the
whole thing.  All of us were walked in and walked out again by the
bailiff practically in chains, so none of us saw the whole thing.

After all that waiting, I thought it was pretty funny how we were off in
another room, busy missing it.

But here's the most frustrating thing: all this was on TV and we
couldn't watch.  Just like a real show, only much much longer, and
without commercials.  The whole crazy drama was coming out of
everybody's television set from the minute the judge banged his gavel to
open up the day to the minute he shut it down.  It's a whole new idea
and for some reason, even though New Hampshire wasn't first about much
besides Presidential primaries, they decided to do it this way.

They used to have people sketching in the courtroom, Mr.  Demaris
said-you couldn't even take a camera behind those doors.  And then all
of a sudden they've got their crews and their snaky wires and
everybody's, like, very self-conscious in case they accidentally get on
camera.  He kept going on about it.  "I'm surprised they don't have
those cards they hold up that say 'Applause." "My father said all that
meant was "Is it good for my client?" Who knows who it was good for,
except the folks with nothing better to do who sat around all day
watching like it was just another soap.  I heard there were people who
were arguing about who they liked and who they didn't trust, and whether
they thought Jacob was handsome, and putting money into pools about
whether he was going to win or "lose," whatever that meant.  I thought
the least they could do was pay us star salaries.

Anyway, the camera didn't bother the important people much, the
witnesses, it just sat still and stared-what made me extra nervous,
which I didn't need, was somehow knowing that the whole state was in
there with us, thinking their thoughts, full of opinions but not
actually knowing anything.  I mean, the courtroom was kind of small, not
a big one like in the movies.  I think there was only room for about
twenty-five people in the spectator section, and those were pretty much
all loyal friends of both sides who came up from Hyland.  But nobody
else who got to see, while they flipped channels between Exercise and
Cooking, had anything much to gain or lose-watching it was a game.

It was creepy.

And we were the only ones in the whole state and out over its borders a
long way who cared about it but were missing it!  When we asked Mr.
Demaris if we could watch-I mean, there it was, we had a TV in our motel
room like anybody else-he said, "Look, don't do it, okay?  Not while the
trial is on.  We don't need any complications."

I asked him why not.  I was learning to speak up a little.

"Figure it out.  You guys are witnesses." He was a little impatient, I
think.  Frankly, I didn't know what difference it made, as if anyone
would change their testimony at the last minute because of what they
saw.  "You don't have to contaminate yourselves that way.  In this state
we tend to have a lot of trust.  We don't sequester juries very readily
and we don't lock up our witnesses, we've always just asked people to
refrain from reading the newspaper or watching the news.  So now there's
this new technology that's not really intended for you.  Whether I like
it or not, this thing is not for the players, it's for the audience.

And you're not the audience.  Don't take advantage." He gave my father a
very harsh look when he said that: he didn't trust him.  It meant, I
know you have a way of making your own rules.  I guess he could imagine
Daddy sneaking off to get a glimpse of the forbidden proceedings, sort
of like an alcoholic taking a quick nip.  "Just don't," Mr.  Demaris
warned him.  "Prudence, for once.  You'll find it a heady experience."

But later.  Later it was legal.  Mr.  Demaris gave the tapes to my
father and he carried them in gingerly, like something that would
explode if he dropped it.  We sat down around the television set and
there was no way to do that without thinking of all the easy innocent
hours we spent over the years watching the Celtics or Masterpiece
Theatre or Saturday Night Live, and my mother sighed and put her head
back with her eyes closed.  It was like she was saying a prayer.

At first she hadn't wanted to watch, she said it had all been too much
the first time around, why did we have to do this to ourselves?

"It's been done," Daddy said to her.  "It's part of reality now.  It's
out there."

"Where's 'out there'?" she asked him.  "You just don't want anybody else
to know anything you don't know."

But I think he was right: everybody else had seen us, friends and
strangers.  Until I saw what we looked like, I kept feeling they could
see me behind my back.

Martha's parents were very emotional, just like we expected.  Her mother
kept breaking down and having to wait until she could continue, and her
father was so eager to answer he was always starting to talk before the
questions were out.  He looked sort of like an intelligent rodent in a
suit and tie, like a character in a children's book that they made into
the animal he most resembled.  Even the prosecutor had to try to keep
him calmed down.  My dad said it was "contrived," but I didn't see why
it would have to be, even after all this time.  I thought about Jonah's
gourd and how to be generous about the love others had for their
creations.  I tried to imagine how I'd feel if they finally got around
to a trial over the murder of someone I loved, like him-I put my father
in Martha's place, although that was just about impossible-and I didn't
have any trouble imagining how horrible that would feel and how I'd have
to "struggle for composure," the way the newspapers say it.  But who
knows?  I've gotten very cynical, along with the generosity.  They sort
of alternate in me now.  So I don't believe everything I hear, like,
there's always a little itch of doubt.

But why would her parents have to fake a single tear-if mine could lie,
why couldn't hers do anything they wanted to?  I'm not that cynical.

The witnesses we had been most afraid of were her friends like Tina Guy
and her cousin Donna who back in Hyland had called Jacob "dangerous."
But of course they weren't allowed to talk like that.  I knew they'd
like to accuse him of shoplifting.  Borrowing a car once without
permission, before he had a license.  Drinking under-age and just enough
grass to make him normal.  Everybody admitted they "experimented" with
different kinds of pills and even some cocaine.  But they all did it,
for years they did it, so Jacob didn't seem worse than anybody else. His
own friend Jackie had said in school, and it came back to me in a
whisper, that when they were at Whalom Park, the amusement park, Jacob
threw firecrackers off the Ferris wheel that theoretically could have
hit somebody, and he had some fights at the bowling alley, but always in
groups.  I said Big deal when I heard this-is this heavy crime?  Donna
tried to say from the witness stand that Jacob once had a fight with
Martha at a party and he threatened to "make her sorry" for flirting
with someone.  He pulled her head back by her hair and yelled in her
face.  Mostly, she said he brought an "air of danger" along with him. (I
knew what that meant-how he seemed to be dreaming of danger, worse than
shoplifting and firecrackers, even if he wasn't committing it.)  But Mr.
Demaris objected-what did this have to do with the crime he was accused
of here, today?  Jacob Reiser is not on trial, he said, for "an air of
danger."

Later, he made fun of the whole "air" idea.  "Did he smell of
gunpowder?" he asked the jury.  "Do you think you could smell him
coming?"

The worst part that I can remember was that Jackie went on the stand
because he was with Jacob just before Jacob picked up Martha at work on
that very day, and they did a lot of talking.  Jacob was "agitated," he
said, a word that was so much beyond his vocabulary you could tell he'd
been helped a little.  He said Jacob had told him that Martha drove him
so wild that if she ever twe-timed him he didn't know what he would do,
he didn't think he could control himself.  Mr. Demaris made him agree
that Jacob never said what he'd do, he didn't "specify." So it was like,
wow, what a confession.

Jackie also claimed Jacob had complained-this was all on the way to the
ice I ream shop!  -that Martha had "a certain part of his anatomy in a
vise," and he couldn't get it loose.  "Would you like to specify the
particular part?" Jackie was a big, short-haired boy whose neck, in a
crew-neck sweater, looked like a football player's.  He blushed and the
courtroom tittered." (Newspaper words.  I love them.)  It didn't seem
like a courtroom that tittered much, so the laugh sounded good for the
defense.  It was amazing how little "hard" evidence they had that Jacob
was any more of a menace than most teenage boys.  (Mr.  Demaris always
talked about hard and soft, as if you could feel the testimony in your
hands, and touch its texture.  Well, maybe a lawyer can.) So he made it
sound like Jacob was more a neighborhood pain in the neck, a "ruffian,"
or even just a "would-be ruffian," than a coldblooded killer who should
have been off the streets.  And most of that the defense kept out-it was
gossip, not evidence.  There was only one serious witness-the others, if
there really were any, never panned out.  "In a small town like this,"
my mother said suddenly-it was the first thing anybody had said in a
long time and I was shocked by her voice out of the half dark-"people
will do that.  They get afraid of committing themselves in public,
though they'll have plenty to say behind their hands." The one brave
witness had seen the two of them stopped by the side of the road, a Mr.
Gellhorn, who worked in an insurance firm in Howe and was driving home
on Poor Farm Road just at twilight, and he could only say they were
standing beside the car talking-nothing suspicious about that.  No, he
didn't think they had anything in their hands, but it was hard to see if
you weren't looking.  They might have been arguing, but he couldn't
honestly pretend to know, it was just a quick glimpse.  He had slowed
and shouted to them to ask if they needed help and they waved him
off"Both of them?"

"I don't remember"-and that was that.  No, Martha had not looked
desperate, particularly.  He had shrugged at the prosecution, who
clearly wished for more, and said, "Sorry."

The forensics testimony was garbled.  Mr.  Demaris knew that already
because he had gotten reports on it, but he was still ecstatic.

(These lawyers already know so much when they come into the courtroom.
Mr.  Demaris said surprise witnesses only show up in the doorway in bad
movies, and everybody gasps, and then you know they're going to hear the
real truth.)  I remember how he kissed Mag Trottier and danced around
the room with her; she had predicted that they had nothing good, and in
a case that is only "circumstantial," she said you needed really clear
physical evidence.  (Mr.  Demaris called it "hot props.") Now, on the
tube, somebody said "the couple"-Jacob and Martha-had used the cabin
that afternoon, there was lots of proof of "recent use."But no one had
denied that; they couldn't make anything out of it.  And too much time
had elapsed before the police impounded the car-they admitted it "might
have been" tampered with; it might not.  It was suspicious that Daddy
had looked in the trunk before the police came with their warrant, but
in itself they couldn't make that prove anything.  (They tried to show
that it was "intent to suppress suspicious evidence," but Mr.  Demaris
asked "what guilt, specifically, a father's concern would express if the
contents were left untouched.") I suppose you could say my father got
lucky, because the inspection of the inside of the car was
"inconclusive." The evidence in the trunk was impossible to read, a lot
of old sawdust mashed around-they couldn't tell how long it had been
there-and a tarp and a lot of hunks of wood lying loose.  There were
fibers from some kind of carpet, but in general it was such a mess they
couldn't tell much-the evidence was "not suggestive." They could
demonstrate, with hairs and bits of thread, that Martha had sat in the
front seat.  But that was no big deal, no one was denying that.

They found a jack, a little baby one, all neatly folded up in a box, but
the only fingerprints on it were my father's and some that must have
belonged to whoever owned it before he did-they certainly weren't
Jacob's.  He had never fixed a flat in his life.  It was amazing what
Mr.  Demaris thought of: they had a guy from the Southside Garage come
in to say he had gone out once on a rainy night to jack up the car for
Jacob.  (I remember Jacob heard it from my father for that.  Daddy made
him pay for it-he wanted to have him pay double, but Mother said that
wasn't fair, what you can't do you can't do, and you shouldn't have to
be punished twice for it.  Daddy said he just didn't want to get wet,
and can and can't had nothing to do with it.) A lot of people testified
about Jacob's sainthood.  Friends of the family, the Bergers, Annie, a
few nice people from around town, one very classy woman Jacob worked for
one summer cutting brush around her house, and Nat the school-bus
driver, who said he was usually polite, even if he was always late and
noisy.  "School buses are terrible places," he told the jury very
seriously, like they were a social blight or something, but "As boys on
school buses go, I'd say he was a very good one."

Then it was my turn.  There I was, dressed about five years younger than
I was, looking a little less than real.  They kept asking me to speak up
and now I could see why-how could I have known my voice sounded like it
was coming out of my shoes?  And it was mortifying, I looked so stunned
you'd have thought I was just waking up from a coma.  Honestly, I didn't
know I was that scared.  But even if I gave a great Hollywood
performance, it wouldn't have mattered: me they dismissed.  It was
clear, somehow, that I was my mother's "object." I would say whatever
she did, I was "under her power," so nothing I said proved anything one
way or the other.  The lawyer was insulting just under the surface, very
soothing and patronizing as if he was talking to a four-year I ld.  I
might as well have stayed home.  It made me so furious-I'm afraid I
sulked more than I should have if I wanted to prove I wasn't a kid.
Mother told me I did fine, but I know I was just the baby again.

So we sat there-this was over days, you know.  A whole trial without a
word missing cuts into your time worse than anything, and bad enough it
did that once in real time, here we were captives a second time around,
of our own free will!  I couldn't believe so many strangers had cared
enough to watch the whole thing.  We had our munchies while we watched.
Sometimes we ate a whole meal; the sound of chewing, swallowing (my
father is the noisiest drinker), sort of punctuated the cast of
characters, which by now everyone had turned into.  The camera didn't
really move around like it would in a movie or a good TV program, but it
did all feel like a play sometimes.

Dinner theater.

Then one night after we had cleared the dishes and pushed the little TV
tables away, my mother came on.  (She was, technically, a prosecution
witness, but she refused to have anything to do with the "state team."
She just went to say her piece but would not, as she put it,
fraternize.)  She was wearing her soft blue dress, it was one that I
loved and I helped her pick it-not severe, not sexy, just a nice sort of
dress that didn't give you any ideas about her whatsoever.  Her voice
the newspaper called "soft and regretful," which was pretty accurate. My
father was sitting on the couch and my mother was right next to him,
they were not quite touching.  She wasn't even watching, she kept her
eyes closed, but Daddy was so tense he looked like he was going to fall
on the floor.

And I was very proud of her.  Every time the prosecutor tried to get her
to say something, she'd raise her hand and move it in that soothing way
that says, "Patience, patience," as if to a child-I know the movement
from my whole life, I'm sure she practices it a lot in her work when
terrified mothers are throwing too many symptoms and stories of
how-it-happened at her at one time, just "There, there, easy now, we'll
get it all in good time." And she will not be hurried.

As she talked about what Jacob had confessed, it just seemed a sad,
unplanned, accidental act, a boy's mistake.  All her own anger seemed to
have seeped away, or to have washed away like old blood.  Someone wrote
in the paper that she seemed "defeated," but I don't think that's the
right word.  All that was left seemed to be sadness.

Somewhere along the way I saw that my father, there on the couch beside
her, had turned to my mother and was staring at her, not at her flat
image out there in front of him.  He would do that awhile, and she'd
keep her eyes closed, just listening to her own voice going over this
terrible ground, and then he'd switch back to the set, and his lips
would move a little but I couldn't hear any words.  Then he'd look back
at her again, the real, solid woman in her purple bathrobe with the
television light flickering high and low over her face.  She looked
totally different and yet wasn't-and was-and I thought how we had all
dragged through so much together and I still couldn't dare guess what he
was thinking about her.  If deep down he respected her or hated her for
what she was saying, or if he could even understand it.

Was he, like, trying to lay one image on the other and see if they
really matched?  Or guess what she felt when he looked at her that way,
he seemed so astonished and hurt and familiar and far away, right there
at her side?

The next night, though, in a different mood, I guess, he called out,
"Hit it, hit it!"

"What?" Me.

"You've got the remote.  Back it up.

"To where?"

"To where she starts that-"

"Jesus, Ben," my mother said and sat straight up.  "Isn't once enough?"

"What, don't you like hearing yourself say that about your son?"

"Oh, please."

The stupid laughter of Love Connection flooded the screen while I waited
for my orders: a gross man with a headfol of vain blond hair was telling
the world how his date came downstairs to meet him looking "sort of like
a dog who fell into a blow dryer" and the audience was howling, cheering
him on.  The date had to sit there and laugh with them.

"To where you said you sometimes worried about him."

"Ben, please," Mother said to him quietly.  On the screen she looked
drugged with the pain of all this, you could tell her mouth was dry, and
she was sitting tight, as if it hurt to move.  He was still on her, I
thought, like an anxious dog, and she was aloof, alone-a cool, quiet
cat.  He still didn't understand.

"Why don't you leave her alone, Daddy?"

He shot me a look, about as surprised as I was, and settled down again.
It was the beer, I told myself.  He had lined up a couple of bottles on
the floor beside the couch, like other people's fathers.  Like if you
tried hard enough you could pretend this was a football game.

So this was what all those strangers were seeing when they probed for
motives, the attorneys for both sides, trying to straighten out what
happened and why.  It was enough to make you dizzy.  And it was just
like the soaps, I could sort of see it: Why would this woman condemn her
own son?  How could parents try to cancel each other's stories out that
way?  Mother had thought Mr.  Demaris would tell the jury that it was
Marital Hell that did it, a fight to the death over the body of their
child.  But how would he prove such a thing?  They weren't one of those
famously miserable couples, nobody would come in and testify that she
hated him so much she'd lie about a hideous thing like this just to make
him suffer.  None of their friends would say what would have to be said.

Mr.  Demaris's questions were terrible.  "Tell us what you saw when you
attended the body of Martha Taverner in the emergency room.

That shook my mother, anyone could see that, like he'd struck her in
some sore part of her own body.  She had been through this once already,
there she was, and she had read the news stories about herself (the
"blonde," how she was "pale but determined,"

"cool and unshakable"), but it didn't seem to be less of a shock at this
distance, even if you were braced for it.  How did she get along with
her son?  She loved him, of course, loved him tremendously.  He made her
go on with that-how gentle she thought he could be in certain
situations.  How kind, how unviolent.  Troubled and in need of
attention, but basically a superb boy.

Then I suppose he got where he was trying to go: to what she knew about
Jacob's sex life.  How she felt when she heard Martha was his
girlfriend.

"Not good," she admitted.

"Why 'not good'?"

"Well .  .  .  remember she was already-I was hearing this in the
context that .  .  .  she was already dead."

"Why 'not good'?"

"Because-well-I didn't think-wouldn't have thought"-the tan gle of
tenses was awful, and this was so cruel because it was all past tense
already and he knew it!  "I'd have had trouble imagining they'd do well
together."

"Because?"

"Because she was-"

"Wasn't it that her background was different from Jacob's?  Her class,
one might say?"

Of course he was warned off that line of questioning-everybody knows
that's called leading the witness-but I guess Mr.  Demaris always knew
exactly what he was doing and he wasn't much fun to have on the other
side: he was smirching Martha and my mother all at the same time.  And
you can never take anything back, even if the judge says "Disregard
that" to the jury and gets angry with the lawyer.

Lawyers can twist things up so badly, and give them shadings.

What Mr.  Demaris told instead of the Story of Marital Hell was much
weirder.  He basically said: A family is a mystery.  There is vengeance
here, and darkness, there is an unhappy woman who saw, actually
confronted in the flesh, a dead girl her son knew better than she ever
realized.  She was a doctor, she was used to controlling every thing.
Maybe, like a lot of the surgeons you read about, she even had a bit of
an "ego problem." And she couldn't deal with it, he said.  She and her
son had been very close while he was growing up.  And now her boy had
this intimate relationship, this totally secret "liaison," and with an
"unacceptable" girl, and it was very, very upsetting to her.

Possibly she even knew about the pregnancy.  And so.  .  .  and I think
he let the innuendos sort of fall, almost gently: there was nothing she
could do about this relationship, so she had to imagine him hurting her,
annihilating her (his word!).  .  .  she had to imagine him removing her
from his life, like an alien thing, an enemy.  He made it seem like she
enjoyed this fantasy.  She needed it.  She wanted to make it be true. In
some kinky way he never quite said it made her happy, as if she imagined
Jacob did it for her.  But that was the feeling you had to have.  It was
amazing to me how not saying certain things could make you surer than
sure you'd heard them.

Mother went absolutely white when she heard what Mr.  Demaris said about
her.  She said it was too sick to listen to.  "I thought he threatened
to make me sound like Medea," she said, "but I think I came across as
Jocasta instead." (I didn't know what she meant at the time, but believe
me, I've learned.) And one more thing.  My mother wasn't only disgusted
by the sick imagination of the defense.  ("Oh," she kept insisting,
"Panos doesn't believe that," and I think she was trying to sound merry,
only her voice kept shaking.  "You can see he'd say whatever would hold
together long enough to get through this.") But what he did to Martha's
name was even worse.  "This is the part I'll never forgive him for," she
cried out when she heard his speech to the jury, his closing argument.
"I can take care of myself, thank you, but this is the lowest blow.  You
can do what you have to to help your client, but this is beneath
contempt.  The bastard.  The newspapers didn't get the half of it." She
covered her eyes and was quiet for a long, long time.

Although Mr.  Demaris had told my father that killing the dead again
could be very dangerous and could really antagonize the jury, he had
also told him it would be "positively criminal" to let it go by.  I
guess he just had a different stopping point from Mother's: he did what
he thought he could get away with.  So he waved the lab reports of the
DNA test that showed that Martha was having somebody else's baby while
she stole off to "the love nest" she and Jacob kept "deep in the woods."
(I thought the newspapers did just fine: they were foaming at the mouth
with this stuff.) "God," Daddy said, pulling the beer bottle away from
his lips to shout, "he looks like Jc>e McCarthy with a fistful of lists
of Commies!"

I don't know who loved it more, Daddy or Mr.  Demaris.  Well, Jacob had
gotten to see it when it was actually happening right there in the
courtroom.  He had to stay all sober and upright, but I'll bet he wanted
to poke his finger down his throat.

"Why," Mr.  D.  asked the jury, "why should you assume she was killed by
her disappointed lover?  She was two-timing both of them, this boy over
here"-and there was Jacob with his head modestly bowed-"and the poor
father of her child, who could just as easily have stalked the lovers
that afternoon and taken out his jealous rage on the girl who had been
unfaithful to him as well.  He could have confronted her-think about
it-just as soon as Jacob abandoned her.

There she stood, by the side of the deserted road, miserable, waiting
for Jacob to return and forgive her, and who should she see approaching
her but-and here, of course, the trail turns cold." That was true: the
police didn't have a clue about who the father was.  (But there was a
father.  It was the hardest evidence they had.  There was a father,
Daddy kept reminding Mother-he isn't inventing this just for the
occasion.) Can you imagine someone crawling out, though, to take credit?
Even the gossips lay low through this one.  Maybe they believed he'd
come and get them, too!  (And then I'll bet there were some sickos who
must have thought Mother did it, or had it done.  God knows, Mr. Demaris
gave her the motive.) The line the papers liked best, and repeated and
repeated till it got really old, was: "This is a story full offire and
ice, of inflamed love andfierce coldness.  A winter story."

Daddy suggested an Academy Award for Best Acting Job by an Attorney.  He
talked about Mr.  Demaris as if he'd written a masterpiece, building up
suspense, pausing at just the right instants, leading the jury along to
the feeling they were coming to their own conclusions.

Mother looked at him impatiently, but-I think there's a word,
"indulgently"?  In a strange way, both of them sitting there in the half
light together while Mr.  Demaris was spinning out this complicated
invention about Jacob and Martha, about them-I could see how this was
theirs.  Just when they should have despised each other-how ironic-they
were very married.

I pushed the power button and the trial was over.

And the jury was hung.

Then we did it again for a different jury, the whole thing a second time
with all the same lines over again like a play that's been running too
long.  My mother kept hoping that my father would letJacob change his
plea to guilty, or plea-bargain for manslaughter, but he was not about
to crumble.  And he won his gamble: the jury was hung again.

Talk about anticlimax.  It seemed as if everybody everywhere thought
Jacob was guilty, knew it, even, but there wasn't enough legally
satisfactory evidence besides "hearsay"-at least one honorable person on
each jury just couldn't convict him.  After all this, that was the
amazing thing: that all it took was one man or woman, somebody very
strong or very stubborn.

It turned out to be two on the first jury and one on the second, but
they never said anything very clear or interesting about what they were
thinking.  Doubt, that was all they could say.  We kept wondering.

It seemed so strange, you sort of believed everybody and then you didn't
believe them.  Back and forth.  It took a long time.  Great, I thought,
that really says it.  Not that I wasn't happy, you know, but there was
something very disappointing about it: all the thinking that went into
this, and all the crying and cursing and confusion, and this is what
comes out.

Mag Trottier said this wasn't the time to care-she and her boss would
study the little bit the jury said, because they could always learn more
about what worked and what didn't, but we shouldn't worry about it at
all.  Just snap our fingers, I guess.  I wonder if she really thought we
could do that.

We had to restrain my father from sending roses to the holdouts.

"Enough," Mr.  Demaris said.  "Enough, Ben.  Let it alone.  Justice Is
impersonal.  And jurors have their own hidden reasons.  Especially when
they're deadlocked, you'd better assume there was somebody in there who
heard things his own way.  (Excuse me, Mag: his or hers.) You want to
ponder why, you'll have to talk to their psychiatrist.  It's just-things
resonate unpredictably.  Consider it a gift you don't need to
reciprocate."

When we finally got home we found a noose made out of clothesline
dangling from our biggest maple tree, compliments of the crossburning
brigade (led, we all suspected, by Martha's father and who could blame
him, really, he had so few ways to express his anger and humiliation).
Pounded into the tree on a piece of wood was a sign that protested in
blood-red paint "The Wrong People Got Hung." It made me want to cry for
everyone.

Mr.  Taverner was so angry and humiliated before, we were all afraid to
think what might happen now that it looked like the law had given his
daughter's murderer more rights than she had.  That was when we knew we
had to find another place to live.  All those good years gone, and no
one "victorious." And Mr.  Demaris agreed, which frightened us even
more.  He agreed, and told us not to dawdle more than we had to.  This
convinced us that he thought there was some justice in the Taverners'
anger, or if not justice exactly, then, as my mom said, more sticking
power in anger than there was in sorrow.

"Go get yourselves a life," he told us with a kind of a crooked smile
that showed he understood how strange our lives must have been all this
time.  And how let down we all were by this "victory." How nobody felt
much of anything one way or another except that it was over, and how
hard it would be to just pick up where our lives left off years ago.  We
were walking around in circles, and the worst thing was to wonder how
many ex-friends would dwindle back into friendliness now.  Who needed
them?  Your life isn't elastic, it doesn't just snap and pull back into
its old shape.  "Go someplace big where nobody knows where the hell New
Hampshire is.  I mean that." Mr.  Demaris took us out to dinner after
the trial (on our money, Daddy said) and repeated, "Go someplace you
never even imagined in your wildest dreams you d live.  Go where you can
leave the albatross at the state line."

The first thing I noticed about Houston was that it didn't have any
cowboys, at least not at the airport.  No big hats, no bolo ties, surely
no horses.  Nobody looked like a country singer.

"What did you expect," my brother said.  "You're crazy.  This is a
business town."

That meant there were milling crowds dressed more or less alike, in
business suits, men and women, all of them looking as if they'd gladly
sell you something.  There may have been a lot more hair, or hairdo, on
some of the women, blond, puffed and turned up, than I was used to. They
opened their mouths wide when they talked and sort of hit their r's hard
and round, which was nothing like New Hampshire.  New Hampshire kept its
mouth closed as if, open, the cold might get in.  While we waited for
the baggage handlers to deliver up Snappy in her cage, I listened to two
little girls complaining to their mother that their brother wasfotting
with them.  I remember that this awed me.

But that was all that seemed peculiar and I had to concentrate even to
hear that.  I had to stare.  I suppose I was expecting some kind of
border, maybe even a passport control like the time we went to England.
Not really, but inside me.  What did a new hfe mean, anyway?

A different language, not just a tilted vowel or two, a different sound
when you struck the air.  I thought of us as refugees.  I don't think I
knew the word refugee when we came; I was almost fifteen.  That's not a
child's word.  But this year I've seen how many there are out there, for
all kinds of reasons.  My school, like I said, specializes in them: kids
escaping from bad divorces, hurtful families, from the suburbs with
their awful standards for what's acceptable, from the cruelties of other
kids if you're a little off-center.  And wanting to be some kind of
artist-my father used to tell me that before I ever knew what he meant:
how you grow up lonely if you see angels dance on the head of a pin. Now
that I want to be one of the angels myself, I really know what he means.

When I think of Hyland, something rises in my throat, maybe fear, maybe
.  .  .  I don't know what, exactly.  It's a shame when you can't look
back with simple sweet memories, but I suppose I'm glad at least we're
banished together.

My father had driven ahead with a carful of wooden people to keep him
company.  He didn't have a lot of new work-he had gotten very little
done since that day two and a half years before in January when Jacob
rearranged everything-and he kept saying he was out of the "sculpture
business" forever.  But he arranged the old ones lovingly in the station
wagon, some in crates, some just propped up and strapped in.  They
looked out the window like friends and protectors.  It must have been
weird to be someone on the street in a little town in Tennessee or
Alabama and walk past our car while he was inside a restaurant eating
lunch, and have this crowd look out at you without a word, serene and
slightly larger than life.  Surely more permanent.

When the sun hits the shaman's eyes just right, they can ignite paper.

He called when he found a house for us.  A nice ordinary house, he
promised.  "You won't find a single adjective to apply to it.  It's the
kind of house that destroys adjectives." The "garden of friends" was
stashed in a locked shed, out of sight.  ("There are no basements down
here.  Or attics, either.  It seems to be a rule of thumb that they
don't ever seem to have basements and palm trees in the same place.") He
said he had driven practically straight through-slept one night in a
rest stop and another in a motel off on a hillside away from the
highway, where it seemed safe for "the guys" to spend the night in the
car.  I wanted to tell him I couldn't imagine anyone stealing a wooden
shaman with glass eyes or a dog on wheels.  But he wouldn't have been
convinced; he'd have said, "There are crazier people than I am out
there." So I pictured a trucker looking over his shoulder for witnesses,
then stealing off with a piece of polished ash in the shape of a naked
woman in boots and holding a purse, hiding it in hIS refrigerated van
between his stacked-up crates of broccoli.

When we got there finally, to our new house-it was a sort of bungalow,
long and flat and odd compared to our beautiful square high old
farmhouse-the first thing I wanted to see was the sculptures.

I peeked in the window of the shed and it was a relief to find them
huddled in there like people told to wait patiently who were making the
best of it.  They were my other family, and it mattered to me that we
had all made this trip, like a long sea voyage, only accomplished
unbelievably in the wink of an eye between takeoff and landing.  (At
least my father had had a chance to change climates slowly, to get used
to different trees and highway signs and names of supermarkets and
television channels.  He could get a little accustomed.)  How could I
pretend I wasn't curious to see what would come next.  The difference
between being alive and, oh, poor Martha, being not-alive, was nothing
but having what I omes-next to look forward to.  I could walk to the
corner and back and see what the other houses looked like, and the
Houston grass and flowers, which might not be the same as I grew up
with.  Curiosity.  Who cares about dying for any other reason?

The punishment is exile.

Did you know that the Bible talks about Cities of Refuge, where you can
go if you have killed someone accidentally?  They are for the blameless,
who are endangered nonetheless.  They are the only places that are
officially off-limits for the seekers of revenge.  Safe cities.

The damage you may do yourself is not forbidden.

There are some beautiful buildings here, but my buildings have always
been mountains.  Still, there's green.  It's a fecund place, nastily
moist sometimes but otherwise benign and surprisingly sweet.  No snow,
my grief.  Cold, hard freezes even, but nothing beautiful to take the
place of what disappears in winter.

The power of positive thinking: This is not an escape.  It's a
continuation.

Everything I've hated about cities shields us here-so I was right about
them.  There are I ,924,763 people within the city limits and only four
of them know about my son and Martha Taverner.  Everyone we've met seems
to have left some kind of life behind, even the natives: a husband, a
wife, a profession, a city of origin.  So in our case it's a little more
dire, our history, but no one knows us well enough yet to care that
much.  Or they have trouble imagining, even if they believe it.  The
kids have an expression"location situation"-that means, as far as I can
tell, "You had to be there."

What continues the connection with Jacob's guilt?

Almost nothing.  Legally nothing.  He was set free by the state to go in
peace.  He can vote.  He can carry arms.  If he's crazy, in another
fifteen years he can run for President.

Does that seem unfair?

Not really.

Do you feel guilty?

Yes.  Really.

There is a whole new sky here, I'm not sure it's the same one I've
looked at all my life.  Gaudy at sunset, flamboyant as hell, lit red,
often, at night by-refinery fires?  Particles of deadly chemicals
hanging snagged in the moisture?  Sometimes the air smells of coffee,
vaguely burnt, and sometimes of a greasy indeterminate.  Often,
suddenly, of flowers, as if a powdered woman has walked by out of view.

The magnolia trees are self-possessed, cool, glossy: domineering
beauties.  Everything about them is slick and huge-their leaves, their
seed cones like hand grenades, with red seeds lined up so carefully
inside.  Their soft flowers more like skin than skin.  I wish I could
make one, but they're already made.

Women walk down the street near my house, Mexican women followed by many
small children, with one long braid down their backs.

Sometimes one will carry her laundry on her head.  I think about Hyland,
how the keeper of the Hometown Laundromat and Quality Dry Cleaners would
goggle at the sight.

Always the sense of sleaze just held back at the edges-money and malls,
class and power at the center, NUDE GIRLS NUDE off at the margins.
There's a lot of that, but there's a lot of not-that, too.  In Hyland
you need permission of the zoning board to put up a sign for lettuce and
fresh eggs.

Mostly it's like every other place, though-mail delivery, traffic
helicopters, gas stations, cemeteries, bus stops, streetlights,
green-long yellow-red.  It all flows on.  No matter what you've done, or
not done, it flows on.  Maybe if you've lived here all your life this is
your small town.  One cemetery is full of people with streets named
after them.

Carolyn's hospital has a staff two-thirds the population of Hyland.

She parks half a mile away.

I work in hard metals with welding tools now, goggles, a mask, a
concrete floor to quash the sparks-my pieces have an edge, I think, a
not-nice quality: not so friendly-in a warehouse that used to be full of
cotton batting, Ex-Lax, and garden tools.  Or so I've been told.

What it comes down to is, the worse our history the more we had to stay
together-only we knew all the parts, good and bad, even if we added them
up differently.  People were surprised, I think: Don't families fly
apart after "tragedies"?  Indeed they do.  Or might.  But who can ever
tell?  Panos was amazed, I know; Annie Dineen wasn't, she's an optimist
where people she loves are concerned.  But who would have understood us
if we'd gone out into a world of strangers?  We were cripples with
congruent wounds.

This is not sentiment.  It's realism.

One night she came to Ben in their ground-floor bedroom-it was a low
wooden house, nothing like New England, and shady because shade is at a
premium In semi-tropical light-and said she thought they needed another
baby.

This was an astonishment to someone who had not thought about babies
since Judith's car seat had gone into the recesses of the attic.

He quizzed her very carefully.  Aside from impediments like age, could
her state of mind support the idea of beginning again?  Had she not
fought a tumultuous battle with herself, with him, over responsibility,
blame, the outcome of love and concern?

Just so.  "I have.  Of course.  So have you." She smiled.  There was a
crazy way they'd say that in New Hampshire that made no sense at all:
"So haven't you." But they said it, anyway.

Jacob was not particularly thriving, although he was holding his own. He
was learning to drive a forklift for a cement company, which was not
what they'd have predicted for him, but he seemed to be resting his
mind, disengaged from anything that had consequences.

He seemed stunned, that was probably the way to think of him.  He would
not get angry-mild irritation seemed about as much as he would show.  A
kind of hopeless acceptance of slights, piques, impediments.  What, she
wondered, was that costing him?  Worse, where was he hiding it?  She
didn't believe psychology was simply the physics of the coiled spring,
but now and then she would sneak a hard look and worry that he might, if
he kept on being so good, one morning take a shotgun to them all.  But
he was clean, given the temptations out there.  (Seemed clean.  Who
could say.)  He was shy, constrained, conservative, like someone who'd
been terribly sick.  One of these days he would get his own apartment,
but apparently not yet.  She wished she could ask if he was afraid-he
ought to be if he wasn't-but she asked him nothing.  He had begun to run
every day, to play basketball, to groom his body, which must have seemed
innocent to him, and pliable.  He didn't talk much.

And Judith.  It was the first time she had ever really worried about
Judith.  Even at the height-or maybe it was the depth-of the confusions
over Jacob and how to go on together, she hadn't exactly felt anxious
about her, Judith's instincts were so right, so very pure and young in
their extremity.  Now, though, she was growing unsentimental with
alarming speed.  All she showed at home was an I've-seenit-all
contemptuousness.  It wasn't making her bold, exactly-Judith would never
be a Nina, a bad girl, an acter I uter.  But she was too repelled by
everyone to make friends, and her judgments were not kind: they were
babies or deadheads or clingers or talentless clones; they wore too much
denim or too much black.  What are you saving yourself for, Carolyn
asked her, but she got no answer.  Only her dance seemed worth the
effort, and if it made her ambitious and not too nice in competition,
tant pis.  (A good French student, like her mother.)  She was surely the
up-and-coming star of the dance department, and her dance instructors
loved her long legs, her flexibility.  They loved her will.  Carolyn did
not-it frightened her.

She had one fierce child now and one mild one.  But they had changed
places.  Ben said it was all in flux.  She's a teenager, Carolyn, this
is ordinary nastiness.  Temporary.  Typical.  Children do not easily
exchange hearts.

Given their particular history, she thought she could be excused her
fears; she couldn't survive another set of mysteries.  What in the world
did ordinary hide?  She did not have a child left that she could trust.

She couldn't explain about wanting a baby, really.  When they'd decided
to go on, it was a decision, not default.  She thought, we're stuck with
life.  Otherwise, to be consistent, didn't they need to put their heads
in the oven, or drive off a cliff?  Her sister had called and told her,
"Carolyn, listen.  There's a moment that comes.  If you've had trouble
it comes-I don't know about the others, I don't actually know many of
the others-and you can choose.  In the end, it's alarmingly simple.  I
wish I'd known it earlier." It was what she had told Jacob when he first
came home: Don't do it to yourself.  Others will be glad to do it for
you, to you, if they want to.  Don't belp them.  She seemed to like to
have advice for Carolyn; she called often.  She had surely changed
hearts with someone.

"I don't know why," Carolyn said again.  It was a little like the way
they'd made love after Ben's mother died (finally, right after the first
trial, as if, there in her nursing home where the television blared on
about this murder, that murder, she'd been lingering to hear the
outcome.  It was the only time Ben had been grateful that she didn't
have the faintest clue about what was happening to her beyond lunch,
beyond sleep).  They'd done that defiantly, that raw dance of the flesh,
to go on, to celebrate.  Like Kaddish, Ben said, like the mourner's
prayer that praises and will not blame or grieve.

"If we're going on, we're going on," she said to him.  She shrugged.

"Or else why bother to try to be-what?  Resilient?"

"You want to put your money where your mouth is," Ben suggested.

She laughed.  "That's as indiscreet a way to say it as anyone could have
come up with!"

"What will a child think who gets made as a counterbalance to all this?"
(And what, he wondered, would the Taverners think if word got back to
them?) She didn't know.  Her parents had chosen her, not simply and
naturally but with forethought and courage.  There was nothing wrong
with choosing against loss-it was the best you could do, in fact.  Also,
she threw in, this baby would open its eyes on the wide Texas sky as a
native.  "We need one soul among us, she said, and began the elaborate
unbuttoning of her wine-colored Victorian blouse with its high neck and
voluminous sleeves, "that will feel at home here." She sighed.  "One of
us who wasn't shown the gate under a flaming sword."

"And the gate opened into Texas.  Who'd have expected?" Ben, sad and
happy, wondered if they could really devote a soul to the future that
way.  He wondered if their very genes hadn't been scarred by fear and
repentance.  But what did you ever know about anyone you brought into
the world?  What could luck or love or so I alled knowledge guarantee?
Even knowing what he knew, wouldn't he be father to Jacob again, and to
everything Jacob had done?

"Amen," he said, trying to believe.  "Girl or boy, we'll name it
Sisyphus." And leaned in to help her with her buttons.

But it didn't happen.  Ben, relieved, decided it was the Revenge of the
Feminists, Carolyn's friends who didn't think you should try to solve
old problems with a new baby.  She said, "You mean my ambivalence."
Maybe.

Probably it was age.  That was her doctor's opinion.  (Could she really
be forty-four?) "That's a borderline, you know.  You should have started
a little earlier."

"Hardly," she answered him dryly.  He didn't know her past; thought she
was just another woman panicked at mid-life who wanted one more chance
to walk around the park with the young mothers pushing strollers,
cheating age, while her husband had his mid-life crisis some other way
(probably involving a woman as young as these primiparas).  "Why don't
you wait a little and enjoy being a grandma?"

She shuddered, but he thought it was only disappointment.

Ben did not tell her, because there were a lot of things he didn't tell
her anymore, that it was no surprise to him-the potency of his
contribution to the child was dissipated in weariness.  In lack of
conviction, somehow.  She had not, apparently, convinced him that
another life was what they needed, to complement the troubled ones they
already had in their charge.  A fresh chance.  A clean slate.  But every
slate was murky with their parentage, their defeats, even the waning of
their desperation.  Your apparatus could work fine but sperm needed an
optimistic spirit to make them swim as hard as they had to, and he'd
fallen, his spirit had fallen, like a winded runner, and knocked the
breath out of him.

They were in a canoe, a large one, all four of them, paddling down the
bayou toward the silvered towers of the city.  It was an odd
excursion-you could rent a boat and cruise inside a deep wide gully with
tangles of green and bushes full of small pale flowers that covered the
steep sides.  Large fish bumped the prow almost companionably as if in
greeting.  Birds with carrying voices flew over their heads; there were
feeding boxes for wood ducks along the route, nailed into the trees like
mailboxes.  Not many people did this trip-no one thought of Houston as a
city with a river.

What was strangest about it, though, was just that hiddennessyou
couldn't hear them from here, but very close, up at street level and
through the thin woods, were the busiest streets, clogged with good
shiny cars.  Trailing their fingers in the water here, they weren't that
far from Macy's and Neiman-Marcus!  A cardinal skittered from branch to
branch, an arrow of red like the emphatic slash of a pen.

Carolyn laughed.  "Listen!" she said.  There was the faint
airplaneengine roar, continuous as a ground bass.  "Leaf blowers!" The
woods they passed below were solidly green, just beginning to
turn-Houston's hardwoods made meek overtures to fall-and over the ridge
and out of sight somebody's yardman was herding piles of the
first-fallen leaves from a driveway, polluting the air.

Carolyn leaned against a wicker backrest that came with the canoe.

She looked, Ben taunted, like bloody Cleopatra.  Though the bayou didn't
look much like the Nile.

It was the kids who were pulling hard, shooting them down the little
sluices, navigating around a herd of rocks that suddenly appeared like
the tan backs of horses.  "One of these days," Ben said, "we'll get it
together and drive down to Big Bend for the real thing." For now,
though, it was sufficiently entertaining to know they were here in this
slice of valley below the visible Houston, in pure country-fake pure
country.

They coasted east at a good clip toward the extravagant skyline, its
faceted mirror-skins and fanciful silhouettes, Gothic, Mayan, Unnamable,
listening not to the sound of tires but to the genuine sweet lap of
water against the side of the canoe.  "It sounds s I wet!" Judith said.
"I haven't heard anything really wet in this town but rain." Judith,
part of the dancer's subculture now, wore her eyes made up to be seen in
the last row; her hair was much shorter than Jacob's, with a blond
little rat's tail down her back.

"One of these days," Carolyn had repeated to herself about Big Bend,
which was rumored to be the ultimate big sky, the place where the cowboy
movies live behind the eye, pure geometries of purple and green and
yellow and orange, and that-"one of these days-was what the capsule of
grief was filled with as it broke under her tongue.

Winners again!  Mike and Terry Taverner would say.  The Taverners rode
with her everywhere now, they commented on what would be her luck, her
husband's and children's luck, until they died.  All they had lost, the
Taverners had said whenever the chance came up, was some time, some
money, some respect, their house, nothing real.  Not true, not true. But
they were all here, all of them, she couldn't deny it.  However
battered, they could still say "one of these days," and that was a slash
of joy she felt, no pretending otherwise, when the sun came down on the
bayou like a handful of pale gold coins flung on the ripply water.
"Jacob, look!" Judith called, and they both reached over the side for a
fistful of glitter at the same time, tipping them perilously, laughing.
As the boat poked forward, the coins scattered and rearranged themselves
like a gambler's treasure under an impatient hand.

Joy was another privilege she was stuck with.  Unsanctioned,
regrettable, it swept right over her and made her turn her eyes away,
like too much light.

	 the end.