It had been so reassuring to be ferried around by Dad that I no longer understood what it meant to feel reassured, to feel that I was in exactly the right place, not if a car and D.C. roadways and the sound of his voice sufficed. My apartment was far less comforting than the car, and the next night I balked at it all. The plate of crumbs left on top of my latest to-do list, the pile of professional clothes in the corner, the cheap Cuban coffee maker on the stove, the pans and knives from the supermarket, this shabby parcel where I’d penned myself.

I had intended to go on writing, to record my family’s experience of the long investigation, the awful late eighties, when Dad was on the hook. For even after he’d found a new job and otherwise might’ve gone on with his life, he could hardly go on with his life. The independent counsel was a methodical, moralizing man who proceeded slowly, left everybody hanging. It was 1989, 1990 before the trials started, and by then you had crusty old ex-spooks and ex-somebodies who, worn down by years of waiting, of legal expenses, of whispers behind their backs, of dwelling in the alternate universe of a scandal nobody cared about any longer, broke down in tears on the witness stand. Which was maybe no more than they deserved, maybe less than they deserved—I myself have no clue what they deserved. I only know that during my last two years of high school, Courtney had left and the house was gloomy and quiet. Sometimes I heard my parents arguing in their bedroom. Maggie entered a rigorous training program for dancers that ate up all her afternoons and evenings, and I just found other places to be. I became more social than I’d been before, went to more parties, slept over at other girls’ houses. I was the funny one, offering up sarcasm, imitations, whatever I could do for a laugh, ha!

By the time I left for college, Dad had learned that no charges would be brought against him. And still the battle continued: he was informed by the government that in fact he’d never been considered a target of investigation, which not only stripped him of his very struggle, but also put him, put the whole family, in a financial hole. For if you were a “target” against whom charges were ultimately dropped, you were entitled to some reimbursement of your legal fees, but otherwise you were stuck with the entire tab. He had to submit a petition maintaining that while he may not have been a “target,” he had qualified as a “subject” under the law. Once, when I was home on vacation, I found a copy of that document: Mr. Atherton was clearly a ‘subject’ of the investigation, as defined both by the ordinary usage of the word ‘subject’ and by Section 9-11.150 of the Department of Justice Manual. And in another paragraph: Although the Independent Counsel may have eventually dropped Mr. Atherton to the level of a witness, he was most certainly a subject for a significant period of time.

Witness or subject? That was one of the questions I’d been trying to sort out for myself, all these years later, but I hadn’t found an answer. There was no jewel in the slagheap, and no lifting my father out of that pitiful moment in which he’d had to plead with the court to recognize him as more than a mere bystander. Now, in 2005, it was too late: what good would it have done him to be recognized after so many years, by such a partial and ambivalent judge as myself? Here I had started out writing a cautionary tale about my father, the father whose mistakes I didn’t want to repeat, and then somewhere along the way it had become a cautionary tale about myself, or rather about the depreciated model of myself I carried around, the feckless witness I considered myself to be.

Even so, I refused to accept Courtney’s idea that this was all a dead end. I wasn’t ready to renounce it. I simply came to the not so revelatory conclusion that when you write about your family, it’s not for their benefit. And whatever it had done for me, was already done.

*   *   *

I was invaded by a discomfort I can only recapture in part, a furry weed pushing up through cracked ground, a weed that had become too deeply lodged, by the time I saw it was there, to pull out with my hands. Resentment was one piece of it, but I’m talking about that kind of resentment that bangs around looking for a target, or a subject, that dredged up a boss who’d underpaid me some time ago, also a night in 2001 when I’d gone to a party with my then boyfriend and he’d decided (without telling me) to give crack a try, also a comment my mom had once tossed off, starting with a skeptical Now, if you were ever to get married … And along with all that I felt a more general restlessness, like a person who can’t sleep because she’s lying in bed thinking furious thoughts, except that I wasn’t in bed or trying to sleep.

I stared out the window at the dark street. I had to get out, had to go somewhere, no matter that I had nowhere to go. I thought of “nowhere to go,” oh that magic feeling, thought of the summer car trips we had taken in the late seventies and early eighties, the good years of the Pontiac Grand LeMans wagon and “You Never Give Me Your Money” trumpeting quietly from the tape deck, as we passed through Pennsylvania and Ohio, as our dog farted on our suitcases in the way back.

It was drizzling out and warmer than I’d expected it to be, everything damp but also sharp. I walked to the Metro but then saw a taxi and waved it down instead.

When I got out of the cab, the clouds had hidden the sickle of moon, and the drizzle had turned to solid rain. A handful of boisterous men with near-shaved heads huddled together in the door of a restaurant, as someone turned the volume up and down on their jazzy laughs. The street split apart, two lanes descending under an intersection while one lane hugged the storefronts, and the wet cars dove into the dark tunnel, and some part of me knew my own delusion, that is to say I knew I might not be acting in my own best interests, but when did I ever?

I called Rob from under the awning of his building. He didn’t answer, but just then a middle-aged couple came out the front entrance, and I slipped inside and into an elevator that opened its doors for me. As I neared his apartment I heard, or thought I heard, his voice. I knocked and nothing. I knocked again. “Hey, open up,” I said.

He opened it maybe a third of the way. “What are you doing here?”

“I have to talk to you.”

“This is not a great time.”

“Could you let me in?” Even as I asked I was pushing my way inside. The place looked different with all the lights on, his jacket over a chair, an open bag of chips on the dining table, along with his laptop and a couple of beer cans. Rob had on a T-shirt and jeans, he was unshaven and annoyed with me, and still he was handsome, the fucker.

“So what is it?” he asked, as he walked over to the computer to read something on the screen.

In the cab I’d rehearsed the middle of the conversation I wanted to have, but not the beginning. “I just have some concerns,” I said, and then stalled. I tried to clear my throat, which devolved into spasms of coughing.

“Are you okay?” he asked.

He fetched a glass of water and set it down on the table.

“I just would like to know, what happened with you and my sister?”

Now he stared at me. “I’ve seen her, like, twice in the past fifteen years.”

“What happened in high school?”

“We got together a few times. She was kind of a mess.”

“She was not a mess.”

“Senior year, she was.”

“You can’t just blame it all on that,” I said. “You guys were a couple.”

“Blame what? I’m not blaming.”

“But something happened.”

“Really, your sister was, like … Look, if she hasn’t told you herself, then I don’t know.”

I heard the sound of the toilet flushing. “Is there someone in your bathroom?”

“That’s from next door.”

He was lying. I walked toward the bathroom and opened the door—and there she was. Nina was barefoot, and her hair was down and wet against her shirt, which didn’t seem like her shirt. It was a man’s striped button-down, too big for her.

“Whoa,” she said. Then she laughed. “Oops.”

I tried to say something but couldn’t. Rob, who’d followed me to the bathroom, was tossing out words I didn’t catch. Finally I asked, “Whose shirt is that?”

“Hers was soaking wet,” Rob said.

“Have you even been home?” I asked her.

“Sam’s in jail. I had to find someone who could help. It’s not like my dad’s going to. You wouldn’t.”

“She came here and told me about this guy who’s detained,” Rob said.

I felt sick, wanting to do and say drastic things, but what were they? “This is so … I don’t even know what to call it. This is insanity.”

“I’ve been on the phone to some people. We’re trying to figure out what system he’s in,” he said. “It might be the county, or it might be ICE—”

“Where are your shoes?” I asked Nina.

“I’m not leaving.”

“It’s ten-thirty at night. Get your shoes on. I’m taking you home.”

“You can’t make me go.”

“I will call the police and accuse you of things you don’t want to be accused of,” I said to Rob.

“Nothing happened?” he said.

I thought about my little gun. It occurred to me that although my father had given it to me to ward off a different kind of threat, in my life to date it was the Robs of the world who’d done more damage than thugs or thieves, and this because I’d failed to defend myself against them. I should’ve kept it, should’ve had it with me in my purse, but instead I pulled out my phone.

“I’m calling the police right now. She’s underage. You gave her beer. I can call them.”

“Yeah, okay. Go right ahead. You’re as crazy as your sister,” he said.

“Maybe I am. She’s not, though. Courtney’s not crazy.”

“Oh, she is.”

“I don’t know what the hell you’re talking about.”

“You really want to know?”

“Lay it on me.”

“She was obsessed with my stepfather. She thought she was in love with him. It took me a while to catch on, but eventually I figured it out. She went after me to get to him.”

“Please.”

“She did.”

“Your stepfather. You expect me to believe that.”

“I don’t care if you do or not. She was obsessed.”

“I think you went out with her, you sold her pain pills, you dumped her, and then you were cruel to her after that. That’s what I know.”

“Man,” he said, smiling acidly. “Ask her then. You really should.”

*   *   *

Although it had seemed that I might have to drag Nina away by the hair, she came willingly enough—that is to say, grudgingly, but of her own accord. By the time we stepped outside, all the establishments were locking up. Bilgy odors wafted out of the alleys. A man dashed across the street holding a piece of cardboard over his head and knocked at a black door. I’d found the girl but lost her. I got us a cab.

The driver had the radio on, and we’d gone through a light or two when some pop ballad began to play, one of those songs so simple I wanted to curl up and live inside of it, to float within the girl singer’s breathy voice.

“Was he hitting on you?” I asked.

“No.”

I was at a loss for something to say that might reach her. The barricades were so high, and I was so tired. I was also wound tight as could be. I wished that we could smile at each other again, that I could ease our way into talking, and then I could tell her to stay away from Rob, even though I knew that the same warning hadn’t worked on me.

Nina called her father and told him we were nearby. Helen’s bringing me, she said, and I could hear his voice getting louder and faster before she told him be there soon and hung up.

He was waiting out front with crossed arms and wet glasses, in a big nylon jacket bloated by the wind. When we drove up, he came stumbling down to the street and wrenched her out of the car and held her until she pushed and he let go. Then he leaned over to speak to me through the open car door. I still didn’t know whether she’d been gone the whole time, missing since the day before, or whether she’d come back last night and then vanished again. I had no idea whether he was going to yell at me again or thank me. Maybe he himself could not decide, his face was stung with exhaustion, and without saying anything he stood and shut the door. Because he was blocking my view of Nina, I couldn’t so much as wave goodbye to her.

What Rob had said kept coming back to me. I couldn’t buy the idea that my sister, when she was in high school, had fallen for someone our dad’s age. She wasn’t that unconventional. Yet I had never understood why Dick Mitchell had appeared that night outside the Giant, after Anthony and I had gone there to pick her up. I remembered the look on his face, a look that had gone missing from my parents’ faces, tender and fraught, and I could imagine that a girl like my sister, who was starved for that look, might wolf it down.

However: Rob was a liar! I wouldn’t believe him.

I was all wet around the edges: my hair, my shoes, the cuffs of my jacket. I heard distant sirens. I wanted to talk to Courtney, but it was too late to call. I was stuck on the image of her and Dick Mitchell, and by image I mean a composite of what I remembered from that night outside the Giant and a kind of blurry film still. I tried to shut it down: Rob was a liar. And Courtney was a drama queen. A drama queen, a perfectionist, a bizarre individual—she was all of those, and then again those were labels I’d pasted on her to cut her down to size. Whatever she was, or wasn’t, Rob’s accusation had reinforced my latent sense that while I wasn’t looking she’d gone down to the underworld and back. She’d made a few trips, perhaps. I wanted to ask, why did you go without me? And maybe she would’ve said that there was no way to bring me, or maybe she would’ve said, why didn’t you come along?

I sent Courtney a short e-mail, having first written a long e-mail and then deleted most of it.

When we were kids, my sisters and I would swim in a lake near our grandmother’s house. Setting forth from a tiny smear of beach, we would enter the water, slowly, holding our arms out like featherless wings. We had to divine with each step whether our feet would land on smooth sand or muck or rocks or weeds. I searched for the good sand, wished it could all be good sand. I remember Courtney choosing to walk on the rocks, making a game of it. Come over here! It’s better over here! I would call to her (over here, here, here) and she would reply, No, you come over here!

The thing about my sister was, I held on to that ideal bathing-beauty version of our relationship no matter what, no matter how stupidly we behaved, no matter how much we needled each other. I still believed in some sort of transcendent sisterly intimacy. I suspect she did too. I think maybe this ideal caused us to go at each other all the more, because we both had this underlying disappointment in our ongoing failure to realize it. Every once in a while we came close, though. That’s how it survived.

*   *   *

In the morning she called me, about the e-mail. “What did he tell you?” she asked.

“It was very weird.”

“Like what?”

“I feel weird even saying it,” I said. “You were right about him having some issues.”

“Do you want to get something to eat?” she asked.

“Right now?”

“I’m hungry. Is there anything good near you?”

Twenty minutes later, she walked into the Hunan Palace and sat down across from me. She looked old, thirty-five going on forty-five. Here she was. We’d played a thousand rounds of card and board games, ridden thousands of miles in cars together, eaten thousands of meals, but my accumulated understanding of her was corroded by moldy judgments. I was only just starting to grasp how people in families, or at least the people in my family, refused to know one another. And it was hard to say which counted for more, all those games and cars and dinners, or the fact that when she’d had a crisis of her own, we’d been distracted—or had we turned away?—and let her down.

Courtney pressed me to tell her what Rob had said, so I did. “He said that you were, like, into his stepfather.”

“I never slept with him.”

“Rob didn’t say that. Only that you had a crush on him.”

“Oh.”

“Did you?”

Her eyes glazed over. For a second or two the hurt was right there for anybody to see, until she bit her lip and sent it back to its hole. I wanted to hop over the table and sit next to her and tell her I’d seen that, I’d seen her!

“Wow.”

“I thought it was love. I was sure we were in love, Richard and I,” Courtney said.

It took me a moment before I realized who “Richard” was. By then she’d already plunged in and was saying things I couldn’t quite believe about herself, about Rob, about “Richard.” How she used to write his name in her notebooks and then scratch over it so no one would see. How she would want to go over to Rob’s house in the afternoons just to sit where he sat, to look at this one photo of him. I had some trouble hearing all this. Maybe everything had happened just as she said, and still it seemed so crazy that I wanted to criticize the story on those grounds. And literally too, I could barely hear her. She seemed to be murmuring this tale to herself.

We were the only customers, and instead of the usual waiters a middle-aged man was working, who had told me, when I’d come in, to go ahead and sit anywhere. In the middle of Courtney’s story, he brought our food, glancing at me and at her and then back at me. “Sisters?” he asked. Not for the first time, it was as though having a sister had made me more of a person. I said “yes” with inexplicable pride.

“You’re the older one,” he said to Courtney. Nobody ever got it wrong—they always guessed that she was older. “You look out for her?”

“She looks out for me, actually,” Courtney said.

“Is that right?”

“That’s right,” I said. None of it made sense. We were just talking.

And then he kept going, he told us about himself in far too much detail, as we spooned food onto our plates and—there was no use waiting for him to leave—started eating. Behind the cash register, a small television was tuned to CNN, reporting that there was unrest in Belize, of all places.

It wasn’t until after we left, and she drove me the two blocks back to my building, that she went on with the story. She’d had a crush on Dick Mitchell, a.k.a. Richard, ever since she was about twelve, but then came a time when he started looking at her differently, talking to her differently, and that was when she’d really fallen for him. She used the same word that Rob had: obsessed. She’d become obsessed, and because that was the first time she’d felt so strongly about someone, she decided it had to be love. True love. My sister the seventeen-year-old athlete had been a covert romantic—then again who isn’t a romantic, at that age?

She’d started seeing Rob, but it was the stepfather she thought about constantly, and when she went to their house she would stare at his picture, or, if he was home, she’d linger too long while talking to him. Rob picked up on it soon enough. Worse, he became convinced that the two of them were having a full-on affair, which, Courtney said, they weren’t.

Rob broke up with her, which meant that she never saw Richard anymore. It made her miserable. She hardly ate, she dreamed about him. Sometimes she felt she was losing her grip.

“So what happened that night?” I asked.

“What night?”

“The night I came and picked you up,” I said. “That night you got stranded at the Giant.”

She said she’d been really fucked up that night and didn’t remember it clearly. She remembered going to a party where she drank a lot. She remembered that Rob had been there, and she remembered him taunting her, screaming things at her. “He locked me in a room,” she said.

“By yourself?”

“No, he was in there too.”

“What happened?”

“It was really loud. The party was. I don’t think anybody could hear us.”

“And he—”

“I don’t … You know, it’s kind of a blur,” she said. “At some point I blacked out. The next thing I remember is when I called you from that pay phone.”

I thought of how messy and sad she’d looked when we’d found her, and now I saw that same person making a phone call, her clueless younger sister answering, two frightened girls. “How come you never told me about any of this?” I asked.

She was quiet for a while. Then she said, “It’s not who I am.”

At first I took this to mean that it wouldn’t be like her to tell me, or maybe that she wasn’t capable of telling anybody. Later that night, though, after she dropped me off and I went to bed, I would wonder whether she’d actually meant that the story itself wasn’t her—that what had happened that night hadn’t defined her. She wasn’t a partier, wasn’t a victim, wasn’t the person she’d been that night, was no longer the girl she’d been when she was seventeen. She’d disowned that girl.

I guessed that Courtney remembered more than she was saying, and meanwhile that were I to ask Rob about all this, he would tell a different story, but I was tired of trying to be objective. “I’m so sorry,” I said.

She stared steadily at the road.

“I wish I’d known. I wish we’d all known.”

“Yeah, well,” she said. “Our parents knew. I mean, they didn’t know about that night, but they should’ve known a few things. I was taking all those pills, I was fucking up, and as long as I still got to go to Brown they just bailed. Turned a blind eye to it.”

“I know. They couldn’t deal.”

“I mean, thank god I got arrested. After that I had to go to those meetings, which were kind of stupid but they probably saved me. Mom and Dad never even talked to me about it. God.”

“I know.”

“And it’s like, will I ever stop waiting for them to say they’re sorry? I feel like I still can’t let them off the hook.”

“But Dad is sorry. Can’t you tell?”

“Yeah. It’s just that having him act guilty and not say anything—”

“It’s not the same.”

“And Mom—”

“Mom’s a freak,” I said.

“Mom is a freak.”

“Did you ever see him again?”

“Richard? I did, actually. One day I left school and drove to his house. I think about it now, and I can’t believe I did that, like what if his wife had been there? I guess she had some kind of job. Anyway it was—we mostly just talked, and then he kissed me, and that was—it was weird, I mean for both of us. It didn’t go past that. That was the last time I saw him. I think I had this idea that, you know, we would be together later, like after I finished college. But then—”

“It sounds like things had always been rough for him. I can’t imagine…”

Courtney nodded, and then dismissed it all at once, banishing the ghost of Dick Mitchell from the car with an odd jerk of her chin. I wanted to say more but had no more to say. “So. Anyway…” she said. “There’s something else.”

“Yeah?”

She told me, and I made a sound, a squawk.

“It’s still early. And I lost the last one, so I’m really nervous.”

I pretended I hadn’t known about the miscarriage, tried to reassure her. But oh my gosh this is so great, I said.

I admit that I was not as happy for her as I might’ve been in that moment, not purely and selflessly happy. I concentrated on breathing. I counted my breaths.

“I’m not telling our parents yet. Just you and Maggie.”

“Guess you’ll have to quit smoking,” I said.

“I don’t smoke,” she said. “I mean, not really.”

That denial was so 100 percent my sister that I smiled, and then I noticed that I did feel something other than fear and envy, something warmer: a little yellow feather of feeling that I stuck in my cap.