TWO

^“WE DESCRIBE OURSELVES AS A FULL-SERVICE DAY CARE for difficult toddlers,” they told her over the phone. “We pride ourselves on both sensitivity and tough love. A troubled toddler has many conflicting needs. Toddling is a time of big decisions, including toy selection, formation of attachments, potty use, and even weaning.”

They agreed to steward William sight unseen. They’d fed Pete Magnus a harder line than they gave her: no spoiled boy would prove immune to their authority. Even the most stubborn infants, over time, would yield to their unwavering dogma Spare the Rod.

She would have to drive there and back every day, and Pete Magnus’s truck would be unsafe. William could not be permitted to have free range within the cab. It was a confined space and high-speed collisions might occur as a result of his frantic activities. A pediatrician had once prescribed Ritalin to calm him down, but Estée knew no chemical lullaby would work on William. Instead of resorting to sedatives, she bought an old prison van at a state vehicle auction and redecorated its interior. She bolted down a small fiberglass tree, lined the floor with cedar chips, leaves, and twigs, and ordered an anthill in a sandbox for placement in the corner. She could keep an eye on William in the rearview mirror, through the mesh. Other drivers would steer clear, due to the faded, chipped print on the rear of the van. correctional transport: high-sec. keep well back.

“Shop where your money buys more!” crowed William gleefully when he saw it, clapping the heels of his hands. It was his seal of approval.

“Jesus Esty, we’ll get laughed outta town,” said Pete, surveying it in passing through his Ray-Bans.

“Factory clearance,” grumbled William when his father had turned the corner. “Slashed prices. Total liquidation.”

Debbie Does Day Care ran a tight ship. The building was part warehouse, part bunker, set at the rear of a flat gravel lot, with small windows above eye level and an outside mural of Bambi sniffing daisies. William wore diapers on his first day, beneath a pair of brand-new Osh Kosh B’Gosh overalls, and carried a mouse skull in his zippered pocket for security. He’d never had a favorite blanket.

They were greeted by Caregiver Ann at the entrance. Her name tag featured a happy face and bore the legend Love Hurts. Inside, the walls were thick and soft, sterile marshmallow white. Estée handed over her personal check and was offered a tour of the premises. William scuttled along at her side as they were led through a maze of quiet corridors whose bulletin boards sported crayon pictures of hearts and rainbows. The recreation room was a factory space three stories high. Here, the Caregiver told Estée, was where most of a Typical Day would be spent. The floor was padded wall to wall, and the walls were padded up to six feet off the ground. There were lined pits built into the foam-covered concrete, like swimming pools with no water. Along the back wall huge multicolored balls big as boulders were lined up on a rack.

“The playpens,” said Caregiver Ann. She indicated one of the pits, easily five feet deep with rounded edges. “You see how safe the toddlers are. We have a lot of naughty little ones who like to practice self-mutilation. A Caregiver pats them down when they enter. We do not like a sharp object.”

“What do they do for fun?” asked Estée.

“They stay in the pits during play hours,” said the Caregiver sternly. “They play with body balls or Bouncy Ponies. Beanbag rocking horses. Most toys on the commercial market aren’t geared toward troubled toddlers. Excuse me. My pager.”

She went into the office. William had his eye on another Caregiver stacking mats in the corner with her back turned.

“Shelley Winters: acting turned me into a pill-popping addict,” he remarked, and touched his mouse skull through denim.

“Sorry,” said Caregiver Ann briskly, snapping closed a portable phone as she strode out of the office. “We have learning hour, social expression hour with a JD counselor, vegan lunch, nap time, and interactive psychological support games. No utensils of course. We stress cooperation and confidence. Other questions?”

“How many children are there?” asked Estée, distracted. William was squatting on his haunches, stuffing a bluebottle fly in his mouth.

“We have ten toddlers now,” she told Estée. “We have to keep enrollment low. This is an exclusive service.”

“It’s very important,” said Estée, as she was led toward the exit with William trotting beside her, “that he doesn’t get out of the building. He can be a bit destructive.” She knelt to remove a small wing from the corner of his mouth. “Okay William. I’m leaving, but I’ll be back tonight. Be good.”

She was at the van, opening the driver’s-side door, when he dashed out, scrambled up her legs, and threw his arms around her neck.

“William,” she said, “it’s just during the day. You’ll be fine.”

“Wild bachelor party,” he mumbled plaintively in her ear. “With seventy-two topless dancers!”

“William, get off,” she said. “I’ll be back this afternoon. Come on. You’re a big boy.”

He clambered around to her front by holding onto her head. “You can’t rush smooth flavor,” he urged.

“Down, William.”

Caregiver Ann looked on, with William grubbing disconsolately in the pebbles at her feet for stray worms, as Estée got into the van and reversed out of the parking lot.

At the resort she wandered across the grounds with nothing to do. Pete Magnus, friendly and avuncular, put an arm around her shoulders and introduced her to a guest with a colostomy bag. “Esty, meet Don ‘Tiger’ Tindale,” he boomed. “A colonel, retired. He used to play golf with Dick Nixon. Go figure!”

“Got yourself a pretty little wife there,” said Don Tindale, hefting his nine iron appreciatively and nodding into the distance. “My first wife was quite a filly too. Cunt like a vise though. Had to pry it open with a crowbar.”

“I’m sorry, what?” said Estée.

“Ha!” said Pete Magnus. “Ha ha. That’s a good one, Don.”

Estée floated with equal buoyancy in air and water; her hands were not tied. She was light as helium. She could study the sky without watching her back. In the afternoon, having left Pete Magnus in conversation with a senile poultry distributor from Milwaukee, she laid down a towel over the damp grass beside an imitation Chinese pagoda in Pete’s garden of orchids and fell asleep.

Caregiver Cindy, wearing a name tag inscribed Idle Hands, let her into the rec room at 5:30. Caregivers in padded body armor, like Michelin men, stood with arms akimbo, supervising the play. Little Bill was cross-legged, a bulky Buddha in the corner of a pit. He held a Nerf football in his lap and shredded it methodically as other toddlers waddled and fell in the piles of shredded foam, righting themselves on unsteady bow legs and then falling again. One of them stood up, supported himself against the pit wall, and trundled toward William holding a panda in a drooping felt hat. He held it out to William, who dropped the fragments of the ball and grabbed the bear. The toddler bent down and retreated. William bit off a panda ear as the boy sucked on a piece of foam and cautiously, from time to time, peeked out from under downcast lids.

At 6:00 p.m. sharp the Caregivers corralled the children and made them stand in a line.

“Thank-you time,” said Caregiver Ann brightly. “Now is when we thank the Caregivers for a fun-filled, developmental day. Douglas, you start.”

“Tank oo,” said the toddler who had proffered the panda.

“You’re welcome, Douglas. Andy?”

“Dank oo,” said toddler number two.

“You’re welcome, Andy. William?”

“Buddy,” said William. “Buddy buddy bud.”

Mothers, keys jangling, heels churning up gravel as they crunched over the lot to the door, converged in the entryway.

“How was he?” Estée asked Caregiver Cindy.

“His linguistic abilities are stunted,” said the Caregiver. “For a two-year-old, he’s challenged. All he says is birdy. We think he may have had an early bird trauma.”

“Ha,” said Estée. “Ha ha. That’s a good one.”

“This place is a godsend,” stage-whispered a fat mother beside Estée. Douglas clung to her leg. “I was getting run ragged!”

“We try to instill the social tools they’ll need for kindergarten,” explained Caregiver Cindy. “Tomorrow the children will be playing noncompetitive games, including I’m Normal, You’re Normal: A Game of Discovery. It’s a popular favorite.”

“Wonderful,” said Douglas’s mother, and patted at the pancake makeup on her chin with a flowered Kleenex. “Stop it, Douglas. You stop it!” He was wiping his nose on her knee. She plied the Kleenex underneath his nostrils and he settled on the ground, sucking his thumb. William was face to face with him. As the mother fumbled through her purse and pulled out a mirrored compact, William reached out and poked Douglas on the chest. Estée watched as Douglas looked up slowly, removed his glistening thumb from his mouth, and then, with fluid grace, fell onto all fours in front of William. He scoured the floor with splayed, chubby fingers and was hastily eating dust when his mother clicked her compact shut, screeched, and swooped down to pick him up.

“Douglas! Filthy!” she chided. “It’s a relapse!” She pried open Douglas’s mouth and extracted a dust bunny. Douglas’s mouth hung slack, his rubbery lips manipulated by his mother as he kept his eyes trained on William. Douglas’s mother flapped her hand hysterically, trying to shake loose the debris. It clung first to her thumb, then to her forefinger, then back to the thumb. “Disgusting! Cindy, look! He hasn’t done this in months!”

“Remember the three S’s for productive parenting: support, straight talk, and swift punishment. It is the only way they learn,” rebuked Caregiver Cindy.

On the gravel of the parking lot, before Estée lifted William into the back of the van, she picked him up and looked into his eyes. He regarded her solemnly.

“William,” she whispered, “they didn’t hurt you, did they?”

“Famed fat man slims down by eating donuts,” said William. “Six-hundred-pound circus freak goes on a donut diet.”

“William! What a good boy!”

She loaded him in, dried grateful tears on her shirtsleeve, and drove home singing “Panis Angelicus,” while William leapt and swung happily on the limbs of his fiberglass tree.

The next day, with Little Bill remanded once more into Caregiver custody, she ambled from bush to bush snipping bulbous orchids off their stems and sticking them in vases, swam in the ocean, and played a halting tennis game with a one-armed ex-Marine in his sixties. Pete Magnus kept busy downing Singapore slings poolside with a tight-faced widow. In a moment of solitude, looking out her open bedroom window at a dying palm tree that reminded her of home, she thought she could hear a melody in the fronds. “As the tree grows,” it went, singsong, “so grows the branch.” In the pause that followed, a sea-scented breeze lifted the sheer drapes over the hardwood floor, the pregnant stomachs of long white women.

She vowed to enjoy her new leisure, but during a conversation about local cooking with a diet counselor from Santa Barbara, and later while she was floating her arms atop the surface of a bubbling Jacuzzi, she felt unease, like an itch in space, gone as soon as she turned to face it. It was the hair in a movie projector, trembling at the edge of the frame.

When she went to pick up William on his second day, Caregiver Lisa and Caregiver Cindy cornered her and delivered a sermon on bad behavior. “Little Bill’s disturbing the dynamics here,” said Caregiver Cindy.

“What do you mean?” asked Estée.

“William is a ringleader,” said Caregiver Lisa. “He excites the other toddlers and resists discipline. During I’m Normal he forced another boy to urinate on himself.”

“What can I do?” asked Estée.

“Talk to Caregiver Ann,” said Caregiver Cindy.

Caregiver Ann solicited a check. Hazard insurance.

On the third day, Caregiver Cindy took a leave of absence. Estée saw her limp across the parking lot to her Mazda, whose personalized plates said hotmama, with her right hand wrapped in gauze. Caregiver Ann informed Estée that it was William’s fault, but offered no further details. When Estée went to pick him up on day four, the toddlers were hunched around him in the pit, squatting, heads bowed. William, in his usual cross-legged stance, stared straight ahead, unmoving except for his chubby fists held in his lap, fingers twitching.

“They look like they’re behaving well to me,” she told Caregiver Kim.

“We were forced to inflict a group punishment,” said the Caregiver. “Look what they did to Lisa!”

Caregiver Lisa emerged from behind a file cabinet with her frizzy blond hair in disarray, sniffling and wiping her nose. Her blue eyeliner was smeared. On closer inspection Estée noticed a large bald patch on the side of her head. One earring hung from her left ear: a bright, bobbing Minnie Mouse head. The right ear was bloody.

“William did that?” she asked.

“No,” snapped Caregiver Kim. “They did it for him.”

“That’s ridiculous,” said Estée.

“Talk to Caregiver Ann,” said Caregiver Kim.

“Four grand,” said Ann. “Pain and suffering for Lisa, and she’ll sign a waiver. Plus all her medical expenses, no questions asked. Those little bastards tore her earlobe open.”

“What does it have to do with William?”

“You can either pay up,” said Caregiver Ann, “or get him out of here right now.”

“William,” said Estée, opening the back doors of the van, “have you been bad?”

“One kidney saves two lives,” said William, and hopped into the sandbox. “Beat wrinkles by growing houseplants.”

“Bullshit,” opined Pete Magnus when she advised him of the situation. “They’re only little kids, how much damage can they do? Anyway, those gals are paid to take care of them. They’re responsible for the brats. Can’t prove a thing. They know you’re a soft touch Esty. Debbie Does Daytona is ripping us off.” He sat on his bed, unloading a shipment of Ferragamo loafers wholesale from the manufacturer as William pummeled a Power Ranger on the love seat.

“You’re responsible,” said Estée. “You forced me.”

“Damn right Esty. You were turning into a cavewoman. If things keep on going like this, we institutionalize the little shit when he turns one,” said Pete.

“Forget it.”

“All I’m saying,” said Pete, “is you have to operate from a power position. It’s extortion Esty. This is the tip of the iceberg. You can’t keep forking over money at the drop of a hat. We got a deal with these people.”

“The money’s not the point.”

“Yeah right,” said Pete, throwing down a shoe. He grabbed The Power of Positive Thinking off his nightstand and slammed the bathroom door behind him.

“Carnage in Bosnia!” hissed William, and hurled a loafer at the wall.

Caregiver Ann called later that night. If William were to continue under Debbie Does supervision, it would be in isolation. One of the pits could be converted to a holding cell, at Magnus expense, where William would pursue his solitary pleasures behind wire mesh as the other tots, in social interplay, cavorted a few feet away in the boundless air. A colorful partition would conceal the miniature penal colony from the eyes of more impressionable parents. One Caregiver would be assigned to William’s pit every day, on rotation. “Think of the Caregiver as a bodyguard,” said Ann. Supplemental fees would of course be levied against Kraft-Magnus treasuries to cover the personalized service. Estée said she would sleep on it. She asked William what he thought of the scheme as she put him to bed.

“Fifteen men on a dead man’s chest,” he told her nonchalantly. “Yo-ho-ho and a bottle of rum. Drink Bacardi.”

In his private enclosure, he behaved himself surprisingly well. Instead of leaping and tearing at the mesh, as Estée had feared he would, he burrowed into the foam and disappeared, coming up into the air only when he was thirsty. His private Caregiver’s only duty was to hand him his bottle through a latched hole in the chain link. The only signal that life lay under the netting, when Estée drove in to pick him up, was a ridge that rose in the yellowing heap, a row of brimming wake. William could be seen occasionally, the Caregivers reported, moving diagonally in the pit, crossing from one corner to another; for long periods he stayed humped under the foam against the pit wall and no movement was discernible.

Despite this apparent tranquility, the Caregivers drilled in defensive tactics. They lived in perpetual preparedness, donned sheaths of protective synthetic fabric over their body armor, and cultivated a bunker mentality. One morning, after locking William into his cage, Estée was looking for the bathroom when she found the locker room instead. Caregivers were dressing for duty. From behind a locker she peered in at them.

“Little Bill’s laying low,” guffawed Caregiver Kim, wearing a name tag bearing the chipper slogan A Well-Regulated Militia. She donned a goalie mask. “All quiet on the western front. Save the M-80s till war breaks out,” and she pulled on her combat boots. “Iwo Jima!” she joked, and slung a cartridge belt over her shoulder, which turned out, on closer inspection, to be a coil of skipping rope.

“Hand me the Mace,” said Caregiver Ann, whose name tag now read Shall Not Be Infringed, and snapped a shin guard closed at the ankle. “Lisa, you pack the shaving cream,” and Estée ducked back to beat a hasty retreat as they advanced.

“William, are you really okay here?” she asked him through the mesh before she left for the day.

“A generation gap in venture capital,” said William matter-of-factly. “Durable goods tumbled $6.5 billion.”

That afternoon she slept in her dim room, curtains drawn, her alarm clock ticking steadily on the nightstand. When the alarm went off she hit the snooze button again and again. Finally, waking in a panic, she left the alarm clock to sound relentlessly to an empty snarl of sheets and ran outside. Outside on the steps she was overcome by the whiteness of day, though the sun was low on the horizon. On the practice green, aging couples in canvas sun hats stood talking and swinging their glinting putters over the grass. She had forgotten to put on her sunglasses: the sky was too bright.

Guests on the lawn watched as an old bride and groom stood facing a black-clad minister under a weeping willow tree, in front of a makeshift wooden arch covered with a trellis of daffodils. They were blotches surrounded by a nimbus, blocked into separate shapes and then, as she squinted, connected by radiant bridges of light. The drone of the minister’s far-off voice was a swarming voyage of bees, rushing water.

“Honor and obey,” he said.

Someone passed her heading down the broad staircase, a man with no mass, a blurred knife of shadow in her peripheral vision, unrecognizable.

“Are you the responsible party?” he asked.

“No,” she said. “No. I am not.”

She left the crowds behind, walked to the van, and sat down in the driver’s seat, dizzy. Her vision was clouded, but she was only half blind. She could make reparations. She turned the key in the ignition and struck out for Debbie Does.

She was too late.

The door to the day care center stood open; two windows were broken. She crunched their glass underfoot as she entered. Lights were off. Silence. The smell of rotten eggs: sulfur. She began to jog, past the crayon drawings of sheep and clouds, coatracks and rows of Buster Brown shoes, past the water fountain and the lockers, until she got to the rec room.

It had been robbed of its fluorescent wattage, though light filtered in through the high, small windows, gray beams in the blue dark. Chaotic remains of foul play—dismembered Dinos, strips of padding, torn toddler rompers—were strewn across the carpet. “William?” she called. “Caregiver Kim?”

Bouncy Ponies lay on their sides, wide plastic eyes staring nowhere. Ponies with long eyelashes. She stepped over hockey masks and shredded diapers. Red and green body balls, laced with shaving cream, had rolled into the pits. William’s cage appeared to be intact until she noticed a toddler-sized hole in the pit wall. He’d burrowed underground, beneath the carpeting and the floorboards. There was a twin hole, smaller, in the side of the group pit. On the floor she found a can of Mace. She picked it up and shook it. Empty.

“William? William!”

She left the playroom behind her and ran through the back halls, yelling out names. The back door, like the front, stood ajar, but it was not until she tried the restroom that she saw anyone. Caregiver Kim was lying legs splayed on the tiles, her head propped against the toilet. Her mouth hung open, but her eyes were shut.

Estée knelt beside her and slapped her cheek gently. “Wake up!” She leaned over the toilet bowl, cupped her hands, and splashed water onto the Caregiver’s face. Eyeballs roaming beneath lids, flickers, and eureka. She groaned, sat up, and licked her lips with a tongue as dry as carpet. “Where are the toddlers?” asked Estée.

“Timeless elegance,” mumbled Caregiver Kim.

“What?”

“From Cartier.”

“Are you hurt? What’s wrong?”

“Give the gift of good taste,” said Caregiver Kim, smiling. “Diamonds, emeralds, aquamarines.”

“Excuse me,” said Estée. “Be right back.”

She went out the back door, calling his name as she ran. Past a corrugated metal shed, past a puddle in which a tiny tennis shoe floated, she entered a copse flanked by parking lots. She could hear nothing but the occasional Doppler swish of cars on the highway behind her, farther and farther away. The trees thinned and she was in a trailer park. An olive-green mobile home on hard-packed dirt, with an awning over its door, was the first in her path. She knocked. No answer. Deserted. There was no one to help her. She could be alone on the earth, left spinning slowly, arms outstretched. William was the only company she’d ever kept. He was the product of a long line of bad genes, but beggars could not choose.

“William?”

A warbling sigh, close to the ground.

“William!” She got down on hands and knees. In the shadows under the mobile home something moved. “Is that you?”

It was Caregiver Ann, in a fetal position.

“Come out,” said Estée. “Help me find them!”

“Mitsubishi,” whispered Caregiver Ann in dreamy tones. “Affordability, luxury—”

“Oh shut up,” said Estée, and stood.

Cars were parked outside Debbie Does; frantic parents milled around the wreckage of the rec room. The lights were on again. Two mothers were attempting to communicate with Caregiver Kim, who was lying on her back on a gym mat.

“What happened? Where are the kids?” asked Douglas’s mother, and jabbed the Caregiver on the shoulder.

“For the man who has everything,” said Kim eagerly.

“That woman is crazy. What the hell happened here?” asked a bull-faced father. “Where the fuck is my kid?”

Estée shook her head and pushed past him. From the Caregiving office she called Pete Magnus and told him to bring a search party. While she was talking she noticed color glinting on the floor beneath the desk and leaned down to pick it up: Minnie Mouse. In the rec room, Caregiver Kim was repeating her urgent message.

“Polo. By Ralph Lauren.”

Estée moved through the throng to kneel beside the Caregiver and patted her arm. “She’s in shock.”

“For the man who has everything,” mused Kim. “But still wants more.”

“Jesus, this woman is crazy,” said the bull man to his wife. “Marilyn, Christ, I can’t believe you left Pammie with people like that. She’s on something. These people are clearly drug users. Did someone call the cops?”

“My husband is coming with a search party,” said Estée. The path of least resistance lay in soothing, rote responses. Pete was used to playacting spouse for the guests. “We’ll find them. If we call the police, the day care center could have its license revoked. Do you want that?” She couldn’t let the cops collar Little Bill.

“Shit yeah,” opined the bull man.

“I think we should wait, Junior,” said his wife. “They could sue us or something. This way we can sue them.”

“It won’t take the boys long to get here,” said Estée.

She located a Mr. Coffee on a file cabinet in the office, with a can of Folgers beside it. The parents stood around sipping, the bull man gibbering into a cellular phone as he paced around the playroom. Caregiver Kim was ignored: parents clustered near the front door, leaving her alone.

“Personally,” whispered Douglas’s mother to Estée, tipping nondairy creamer into her cup, “I was looking for a new service anyway. No offense, but my Dougie isn’t as dysfunctional as the other little ones.”

“Oh?” said Estée.

“On my family tree,” she confided, “there are two senators and an admiral.”

Estée was brewing the third pot of coffee when Pete stormed in with a cadre of resort employees. They carried walkie-talkies and wore windbreakers, a SWAT catering team.

“This is it Esty,” he said grimly, jaw clenched. “We find him, put him in a straitjacket, and ship him out. I got a reception back there, I got a sit-down dinner for forty with the goddamn golf-pro sponsor, and I got the IRS on my ass.”

“It was your idea. Just go find him. There are nine other kids and their parents are waiting.”

“Danny Boy, you stick with me, the rest spread out in pairs,” ordered Pete, powered by adrenaline and officious zeal. “Find ’em, light your flare, and bring ’em back here. That’s all she wrote. We’ll split up in back. Esty, you wanna sit in my car with the phone? You gotta be here when we bring our boy in. Keep you updated from my portable.”

“What’s this? Judas Priest. Marilyn, take a look,” said Junior, stooping to pick up the Mace can.

“My Lord, that’s Mace,” said Marilyn.

“Lady? Lady, looka this!” said Junior, and thrust it at Estée. “Mace? It’s fuckin empty. This stuff is toxic. My two-year-old was here. My little girl! What kinda sick people we dealing with?”

“Maybe they kept it for self-defense,” ventured Estée.

“Look at this, people! Mace on the floor. Child abuse. Find those people, choke it out of ’em. Goddamn Mace!” He turned to Caregiver Kim, crumpling the can in his fist. “Lady, I got a bone to pick with you.”

“I’ll be in the car,” said Estée. “Keeping tabs on the search.”

She found a pack of Pete’s cigarettes in the glove compartment and smoked one with the window rolled down. Thank-you time was over. Caregivers scattered to the winds. Behind her she always left deserts or ghost towns, scorched earth and empty buildings. Bill and Betty lay somewhere under the sun. Alive or not alive. The telephone was silent. Her presence anywhere was tenuous; she was hardly felt. She was a husk of elements, air, water, surrounded by solid objects. Substance willed itself into motion. In the dark, the whites of Bambi’s eyes were visible. In the distance, she could make out a pinprick on the skin of the night. First it was red, and then it shifted lower and was green instead. Finally an orange flower bloomed above her near Orion and she got out of the car.

Inside the parents had turned into a lynch mob. They were crowded around Caregiver Kim, hurling insults.

“If my kid was traumatized by this crap I’m gonna burn your fuckin house down,” said Junior.

“Junior,” said Marilyn, “don’t hit her. She’ll sue.”

“It’s not her fault,” said Estée. “Talk to management.”

“Management? They’re gone forever. You think they’d stick around to face charges? Whose side are you on anyway?” asked the bull man. “This kind of crap is the disease of society! Didn’t you read about those faggot priests?”

“We’re all tired,” said Estée. “They sent the flare up. Everything’s going to be fine.”

“Pammie!” shrieked Marilyn, and ran to the door. Glassy-eyed infants were borne in on the arms of Pete Magnus’s victorious army. Parents surged and crowed as Estée scanned the throng for William. Pete, bringing up the rear with his sidekick, Daniel, was covered in mud.

“Little Bill made a fast escape, Esty. Too fast for me. Jesus, what a scene.”

“What do you mean got away? Got away?”

“Found ’em in someone’s backyard, other side of that trailer park. Eating the face off a cat. I go, Danny Boy, you can tell they been hangin out with my son.”

“What do you mean he got away?”

“Kid runs like a rabbit Esty. Had our hands full with the others. Danny puked. Guy’s an animal lover. It’s like mass hypnotism. I’m thinkin Kool-Aid, Guyana. Luckily they were out of it. Zombie kids. Night of the Living Dead.”

“Where, Pete? Where was it?”

“Don’t be crazy Esty, there’s a hurricane watch out. Find him in the morning. Calm down Esty. Just chill.”

“Tell me where, Pete. Now. I’ll go alone.”

“Excuse me,” said Douglas’s mother to Pete, touching his hand. “I just want to thank you! Douglas, say thank you to the man.” She lifted him up by the armpits. He hung like a sack.

“Dank oo ban,” recited Douglas, monotone.

“Yeah yeah lady. Your kid eats pets. You’re not going out there Esty. I mean it.”

“He’s my baby, you idiot,” she said, and grabbed his flashlight.

It was raining. Past the trailer park, she walked over a soft hill overgrown with kudzu beside an access road, scoping with her beam. The terrain grew marshy and she had to find her footing carefully on a rise beside a long ditch full of stagnant water. Rain patterned it with pockmarks under her spotlight and she counted three crushed Diet Sprite cans and an old sock. Cresting the hill she saw a frame house with a basketball hoop in the driveway. She stalked through the backyard. The corpse of a tabby cat was twisted under a bush.

Soaked, shivering, legs aching, she tried different paths from the backyard, over sagging fences and piles of tires, reciting old catechisms to keep herself alert. “Nonmigratory tropical lepidoptera of dry forests spend the dry season in riparian forests in a state of reproductive diapause,” she repeated, kicking over the handle of a rusty shovel. “Saturniids, royal moths. Sphingids, hawkmoths.” A cobweb stretched over her lips as she ducked to avoid a thorny branch. She felt the water seep through her shoes, felt the soles of her feet grow spongy.

Her digital watch read 10:32 when she caught sight of him lying at the edge of a mangrove swamp in a foot of water, his face above the surface. His hands were tied to his ankles, his mouth was stuffed with something red, and there was a bruise on his forehead. She picked him up. He was inert, his skin cold and slick. She removed the gag. It was a tie patterned with gold script initials: PM.

Blue-faced, in repose, he was a hideous angel. She sat down with his body in her lap and performed CPR, hair matted to her scalp beneath the lightning. Finally he coughed up water, shuddered, hiccuped, and blinked.

“William!” she cried, and wrapped him in her jacket. “Pete did this to you. With that bastard Daniel. It was two against one, wasn’t it William. Unfair odds.”

“Tale of neglect in New Jersey,” rasped William. “Deadbeat dads.”

She lifted him off the mound, held him close to her chest, and made the long trek back to the parking lot. The Debbie Does premises were dark, though one floodlight cast the gravel back lot into white relief. She noticed, for the first time, a mound of Day-Glo green under a fringe of lilac bushes at the gravel’s edge, and walked over to it with William, a soggy weight against her stomach, limp and soft, snoring. It was the last of the Bouncy Ponies, eviscerated on its side in the grass.

As she drove home, William gurgled and burped in his sleep. Bye baby bunting, Papa’s gone a-hunting. Better late than never. She knew what to do.

She locked William in his bedroom and trucked to a twenty-four-hour food mart, where she bought frozen dinners, milk, fruit, vegetables, diapers, twelve-packs of beer, and Pete Magnus’s favorite snack: tortilla chips and salsa. She bought in volume. She had five cartloads by the time she was finished, which the lone late-night bagger helped her push out to the van.

At 2:00 a.m. she pulled into the service entrance and unloaded the groceries laboriously. She carried them up to one of the fourth-floor suites, at the back of the building. Its window was small; it was unbooked for three weeks. She packed the perishables into the refrigerator, lined the shelves in the kitchen with cans, cartons, and bottles, and packed diaper boxes and toilet paper into the cabinets beneath the sink.

Sleep was difficult. She lay down on a couch and stared at the ceiling until morning, when she called a locksmith, a handyman, and a bricklayer from the next county. She paid them premium rates for discretion and watched while the locksmith affixed a heavy, keyed bolt to the outside of the suite door.

She was overseeing the handyman as he bricked in a window with quick-drying mortar when one of Pete’s liveried doormen brought her a postcard on a tray. In the foreground were sun-bleached walls, a terrace tiled in blue, and an orange tree. In the distance was a small minaret. She flipped the card and read its printed description: Eternal Morocco. The postmark was blurred and the card was unsigned, but written in a familiar cramped hand at the bottom were four short words.

Wish you were Hear

Over dinner with the golf-pro celebrity sponsor she watched Pete across the table as he talked about the CRB index, futures, and copper prices to a new investor from Boca Raton. Instead of listening, she let her mind wander, through orange groves, past mosques and farms and over hills of scrub and sand, and everywhere was one place, Casablanca, California, the sunshine state. Her father had long arms. Oceans were nothing to him.

While they drank apertifs in the lounge, she transported a pile of Pete’s clothes to the suite. She set up a potty for William and hung a Jolly Jumper from the ceiling; on a dolly she rolled in his artificial tree. She would provide every amenity. She checked the air conditioning and the heating, the plumbing and the lights. Last she disconnected the phone and removed the jack from the wall. All the suites were soundproofed.

She went for William first. Lying curled in his crib, with only the orange glow of his night light illuminating his hirsute cranium above the bundle of flannel sheets and shredded cotton, he was not asleep.

“William,” she said, bending over the bars, “come here.”

She bathed him, washed his face with Baby Wipes, brushed his sharp teeth over the bathroom sink, patted baby powder onto his bottom, diapered him, and suited him up in his Osh Kosh B’Gosh overalls and Buster Brown shoes. He would strip it all off in no time, but for the short trek to the fourth floor she wanted him to wear his Sunday best. “This is what you’ve been waiting for, William,” she told him. “It’s all up to you now.” He gnawed busily on the bars of his crib, leaving tooth marks in the metal.

They used the service elevator. Once inside the suite he relaxed his hold on her neck, jumped down, and dashed up his fiberglass tree. She stood still a second and then turned off the lights.

“Good-bye William,” she whispered.

“Gutsy mom gets transplant,” he said softly in the dark.

She found Pete Magnus in the bar and billiard room in conversation with the golf pro, discussing a full-page, full-color endorsement of the resort that would appear in nationally distributed retirement magazines.

“Excuse me, Pete,” she said, sidling up to him with a sisterly touch to his elbow. “There’s been an electrical fire in 412, they’ve put it out, but it did cause some damage. Can I steal you away for a minute?” And the senile golfer, popping a cherry-colored Luden’s cough drop into his gray flap of a mouth, nodded benignly as they coasted off, and turned back to his Manhattan.

“So you found the kid last night,” said Pete Magnus as they walked. He was checking his manicured nails, his watch, then the knot of his tie, for he was a busy man. “Mother’s instinct or something, like women’s intuition.”

“Yeah, I found him,” she said. “He’s fine now.”

“Fine,” repeated Pete, nodding. “Great, good. Where the hell was he?”

When they reached 412 she pushed the door open, ushered him in ahead of her, and flipped the light switch. “You know where he was Pete,” she said. “William, say hi to your father.”

William was on all fours at the base of the tree, poised to spring. He was still wearing his overalls.

“Murderous rampage in Toledo,” he said clearly.

As Pete stood gaping she pulled the door closed behind him, shot the bolt, and locked it with her shining key.

Stock-still, she waited for protest, for noise from beyond the paneling, through the new bricks blocking the window, but perfect security had been achieved. A grim silence reigned, broken only by the intermittent sound of mosquitoes zapping on the blue-light bug apparatus on the wall outside the room door. She hung a Do Not Disturb sign on the doorknob and stood holding on to the balcony rail to make sure, watching palm silhouettes weave back and forth against the purple sky. She had done what she could. Big Bill was beyond her reach, sitting on a porch with a view of the sea. Small consolation that each dawn and dusk he’d hear the prayers of the faithful floating by on a cool breeze to Mecca: he would never know what they were. He was insulated. It was clear to her now: Big Bill would never die.

In the lobby, she entered the names of fictitious guests into the register under 412 and extended their stay for two weeks on the database. Next she approached Maria, head of Sanitary Services, who was folding white towels in the laundry room. “Room 412 should not be cleaned. There’s a couple staying in there, special friends of Mr. Magnus, and they’re on their second honeymoon. They don’t wish to be bothered at any time. I can’t stress that enough. They have their own supplies—just cross that room off everyone’s rounds. Does Mr. Magnus have your personal guarantee?” Maria nodded and looked down at her feet.

Finally she spoke to Pete’s assistant manager, underpaid and overworked, who had his rooms in the basement. “Pete and I and the baby are taking a trip, leaving tonight. It’s an emergency. Death in the family. We’ll be away for two weeks. Pete’s too busy with the funeral arrangements to give you detailed instructions, but I’m sure you’ll do a fine job in our absence. Here’s a bonus check. I’m sorry for the short notice.”

At ten o’clock she began to pack her belongings into the van; at midnight she checked room 412, her ear to the door. She could hear nothing. The door did not shake and quiver with pounding from the panicked Pete Magnus, newly incarcerated. Still, William knew his enemy. He had always known.

As she drove through the gates, window rolled down, a road map in the passenger seat, she felt a pang for Little Bill. He was a man-eater, but she loved him. Pete was the strongest opponent he’d had; they were well matched. In the event of a standoff they had everything they needed for sustenance. When two weeks were up they might be discovered, enraged but healthy, by the cleaning staff. But it was her bet that William, when he grasped the circumstances of his confinement, would smile, blink, and waddle toward his father with hunger glinting in his eyes.

After that he could take care of himself. Bricks and mortar were no obstacle to him. He was a survivalist and a hunter; he would unearth her trail eventually, no matter how old it was or how far afield, and he would find her. Until then she had, at least, the commonplace illusion that she was free.