10

Valerie didn’t know when she started to mind Karen’s new devotion to Lee. She should have been happy about how easy it was now to deposit Karen with Lee, how easy to take up her own life again, to work at the restaurant, to be with her husband. To forget. Instead she noticed how Lee smiled at Karen in a way Valerie had never seen before, how Karen calmed almost as soon as she touched Lee but grew rigid again if Valerie brushed by.

“I don’t understand you,” Roy told her. “You should be glad she’s willing to stay with Lee. And anyway, I thought you wanted time to yourself. Time for you and me.”

“I do,” she insisted. “Of course I do.”

Didn’t she always have special plans on the nights Lee agreed to take Karen? Things you’d never dream of taking a child to. She and Roy dressed up because time to themselves seemed an occasion as special as any anniversary. They saw plays and concerts. They sat in movie theaters so blessedly quiet, she sometimes fell asleep in them. She’d go and meet Roy in some fancy four-star restaurant that discouraged children, and the whole time he was toasting her with the most expensive wine on the menu, she couldn’t help wondering what Karen was doing with Lee. “Earth to Valerie,” said Roy, and she plucked up her wineglass. “To us,” she said, fixing her smile. She’d drink wine throughout the evening. She’d go home and make love to her husband as long as she wanted and there wouldn’t be anyone else there to stop her.

“Thank God for Lee,” Roy said. He stroked the line of her face. Valerie fit herself deeper against his cupped palm and shut her eyes.

“Tell the truth, do you slip her a Mickey?” Valerie asked Lee. If she had once thought the problem was simply that she wasn’t Karen’s natural mother, she didn’t think that anymore. Not when she saw Lee with Karen. She watched Lee, but she couldn’t for the life of her see Lee doing one single thing differently.

What the hell did they do when she wasn’t there? Lee just laughed when Valerie asked her. “We go for walks. We read. We play cards,” she said.

“You go for walks at night?”

“I’m with her.”

When she asked Karen, Karen was silent for a moment. “We go for walks,” she said, “Once we even walked here. We rang the bell, but you weren’t home.”

“Well, of course I’m not home,” Valerie said. “That’s why I bring you to Lee’s.” She studied Karen. “I don’t want you walking to the house,” she said. “It’s too far and the roads are crazy.” She didn’t mention that the real reason she didn’t want Karen walking to the house was that sometimes she really was home. She’d pull the blinds and close the doors and just bask in the quiet disarray of her own house. And when she went to pick up Karen in the car, she always told her stories about where she had been. Helping Roy who was working late. Visiting a sick friend.

Sometimes with her daughter in the car with her, she would stroke Karen’s hair and her fingers would snag against something prickly. “Come here,” she said, and groomed Karen’s hair, pulling out a burr. “Where did this come from?” she said.

“The sky,” Karen said, reaching for the burr.

“The where?” said Valerie.

“The bonny deep blue sea.” Karen held up the burr, smiling. Where did a child get an expression like “bonny”? Karen was about to position the burr back into her hair when Valerie plucked it free, sailing it out the car window. It bounced on the highway, disappearing under the wheels of a car. “Oh, pooh,” said Karen.

“Don’t say ‘pooh,’” Valerie said. Wild, she thought. Her daughter looked like a ragamuffin. The new jersey she bought her was somehow already stretched out of shape. Her sneakers were habitually untied, and her hair was trailing from the red poodle barrette she had thought would look so cute.

Going through Karen’s pockets, she found things. She found an earthworm, a butterfly, and once a torn piece of brightly colored map. She squinted at it. Texas. Her daughter was carrying around Texas in her pocket.

“Five years old and already she wants to leave us,” Valerie told Roy, handing him the map scrap.

He tore the paper in his fingers, grinning, “Not without her map, she won’t,” he said.

One day Valerie had left Karen in the backyard for two minutes, and when she came back outside Karen was gone. Frantic, she dashed around to the front of the house, calling out for Karen like a madwoman. She sprinted into the road, and then, two blocks away, she saw Karen’s small figure walking determinedly. It was easy enough to catch up with her. Panting, Valerie grabbed at Karen’s arm. “You scared the dickens out of me!” she cried. “You know you’re supposed to stay in the yard. Where were you going?”

“I’m going to Lee’s,” said Karen.

“Oh, no, you aren’t,” said Valerie. She gripped Karen’s hand so hard that Karen yelped. “We’re going home,” she said. “Home, where you belong.”

She began to keep a closer watch and then, in the fall, Karen started kindergarten. Valerie herself would walk Karen to the school and pick her up, and in between she’d have five blessed hours all to herself. She’d have a silence so rare and bountiful she could wrap it around her like a quilt. Northeast Elementary, Depending on how things went, maybe she’d donate some cakes to the bake sale. Or a dinner for two at the restaurant. That might be nice.

Even though Valerie knew the other kids would probably be in jeans and sneakers, she dressed Karen carefully, in a violet cotton dress with a lace collar. She brushed her black hair and tied a red silk ribbon around it. Her daughter looked beautiful, like the kind of little girl who would play with dolls rather than butcher their Dynel hair with scissors, a girl who accepted hugs as willingly as she might give them.

“I’ll pick you up after school,” Valerie said. She was going to the restaurant today, as soon as she dropped Karen off. She was going to lose herself in crab soup and thick sauces and in the comforting cadences of adult speech.

She brought Karen into the class, a large bright room with painted yellow floors. “Look, a hamster,” Valerie said. She pointed to a small clean cage by the window. The hamster was running around and around an exercise circle. “Let’s go find the teacher.”

The teacher’s name was Mrs. DeCamp, and as soon as she saw Valerie with Karen, she ame over. “I recognize you from your wonderful restaurant,” she said to Valerie. “I had a feast there.” She looked down at Karen. “Well, and who’s this?” she said brightly. Karen looked up at Valerie as if Valerie were betraying her. “I’ll see you at one,” Valerie told Karen. She wasn’t going to make a fool of herself bending for a kiss Karen would only wipe off. “Would you like to see our kinder garden?” Mrs. DeCamp said, pointing to a small row of pots. “Everyone is going to grow their own bean plant.”

“I don’t know,” said Karen. Baffled, she turned toward the row of cooking pots. “Like mother like daughter,” the teacher said, and in that moment Valerie left quietly.

All that morning Valerie expected a phone call from the school. When she went to get Karen she expected Mrs. DeCamp to be standing there, hands on her hips, insisting Valerie keep Karen back another year. But Karen bounded out smiling, a crepe-paper flower in one hand. She seemed to like her first day. “Mrs. DeCamp said I could take the hamster home one weekend,” she said. “The whole class gets to.”

“Isn’t that nice,” said Valerie.

Every morning Karen willingly set off for school. She almost always had something in her hand when she returned. Clumsy letters on a sheet of blue-lined paper. A crepe-paper flower. Sometimes, though, she brought home drawings that Valerie couldn’t bring herself to tack up on the refrigerator because they were always of a woman she didn’t know, a woman with short blond hair and a black jacket and high black boots, standing beside a motorcycle.

“Would you like to invite any friends home?” Valerie asked Karen one night at dinner.

Karen shook her head. “Lee,” she said.

Valerie calmly pulled apart a minibaguette. That morning in the restaurant Lee had leaned against the stove and asked a million insistent questions about Karen. Did she like the kids? Was the teacher too strict? She had wanted to invite herself to dinner. She had books for Karen, she said. She had a box of paints. She wanted to come over that night. “Tonight’s not good,” Valerie had said.

“Isn’t there anyone in your class you like?”

“Amy,” said Karen. “Jane.”

“Well, whenever you want to invite them over you can,” Valerie said. She looked across the table at Roy. He seemed more relaxed. Things could be all right. Karen was already less disruptive at home. Maybe she could make some friends, maybe she could be socialized the way the psychologist had said, transformed into a daughter despite herself.

Karen had been in kindergarten nearly a month when Mrs. DeCamp called. Karen was having tantrums. She couldn’t make friends.

“What about Amy?” Valerie said.

“Amy?” said Mrs. DeCamp. “There’s no Amy in my classroom.”

“What about Jane?”

“Mrs. Hayes.”

Mrs. DeCamp cleared her throat. She told Valerie Karen kept to herself. She kept drawing these paper dolls with clumsy genitals, drawings Mrs. DeCamp had to confiscate before they confused the other children. Karen hit the other children. She used the words “damn” and “shit.”

“But why I’m really calling,” Mrs. DeCamp said, pausing, “is that Karen keeps walking out of class.”

Valerie felt suddenly dizzy. “She does?” she said. “Where does she go?”

“Don’t be silly,” said Mrs. DeCamp. “I catch her before she’s halfway onto the playground.”

“I’ll take care of it,” Valerie said.

She hadn’t the foggiest idea how to take care of such a thing. She didn’t want to do one single thing that might make Karen dislike school enough to start balking about going. She had to be discreet.

That night she was leafing through a Parents magazine when she came across the answer. Sleep hypnosis. You could tell a drowsy child that he wasn’t going to wet the bed anymore and the suggestion would implant as firmly as if a hypnotist had given it. You could make a child think behaving was his own idea and not yours.

Valerie put down the magazine. Karen was already in bed, burrowed sleepily under the soft blue coverlet. Valerie bent toward Karen, “You want to stay in the classroom,” she whispered. Karen’s lids fluttered open. She looked at Valerie with real interest, “You stay in school.” Valerie whispered again, stroking Karen’s small pulsing lids shut.

The hypnotism didn’t work. Valerie got a call from Mrs. DeCamp two days later and then again the following week. Karen kept trying to walk off. Karen had hit another student. Karen had taken her wax carton of milk and poured it into the lap of another student.

The more Valerie tried to tame her, the wilder Karen seemed. At home she hurled her dinner plate to the floor. Her nightmares increased. In desperation Valerie began bringing Karen to Lee’s, but even at Lee’s Karen seemed worse. When Valerie came to get her, Karen was filthy dirty, zooming around and around in furious circles, and although Lee shrugged it off as play, Valerie was alarmed.

She and Roy went to conference after conference with the teacher, with psychologists, but no one seemed to make any difference. Valerie and Roy kept Karen in at night. They tried rewarding her with toys when she was good; for one week Valerie even gave her baby tranquilizers, which seemed to make Karen edgier. She began to have prickles of doubt about ever having adopted, and although she could never come right out and ask Roy, she wondered if he was sorry they had adopted, if secretly he blamed her for not being able to conceive.

The truth was that Roy didn’t blame anyone but himself. He should have insisted they find a baby; he should have convinced Valerie a childless life was still one worth living. He shouldn’t have given in to love.

He hated feeling like a bad father, but he couldn’t discipline Karen any more than Valerie seemed to be able to. When he was most furious, he made her go to her room. Exhausted, he’d slump in the living room, thinking about when he had first courted Valerie, how the two of them used to go and rent movies, bringing four back to his apartment, but by the end of the evening they hadn’t watched a single frame. They hadn’t seen a thing but each other.

There was never a single sound from Karen’s room. When he went to check on her, she was coloring on her bed or leafing through a picture book Lee had given her, making up her own words to the story. When she saw him, she fiercely turned away.

He couldn’t help his frustration. He couldn’t help the way his stomach clenched as soon as he approached the house. He began to wake up early just so he could have some silence. He kept out of Karen’s way simply because he couldn’t bear the way she seemed to stare through him, and he began to get angry about it. What was so terrible about him that a little girl would seem to hate him this way? What was so unappetizing about his hugs? He got into bed and burrowed against Valerie, who was so still and quiet, it bothered him. “You there?” he said, propping himself on one elbow. She was staring into the darkness, listening to Karen kicking her bedroom closet, the thud like a heartbeat through the wall. “Val?” he said. She didn’t turn toward him. He floated a hand down her breast and she moved away. “I’m just too knotted up,” she told him.

“You want to talk?” he said.

She shook her head.

“No? Not even to me?” He stroked her stomach lightly.

“Not even to you,” she said. Stricken, he took his hand away.

He lay in bed until almost three, and every time one of the fluorescent numbers clicked ahead into the next, he didn’t think, This is a new day. Instead, he thought, Time is running out.

He was gone when Valerie woke up. Uneasy, she hustled Karen off to school and then went to Roy’s office.

His secretary told Valerie he hadn’t wanted to be disturbed, but she went into his office anyway. He was sleeping on his office couch, his mouth soft and open. She crouched beside him, kissing his cheek. He blinked up at her.

“I missed you this morning,” she said.

“Did you? You don’t seem to that much anymore.”

She sat on the edge of the couch. “Yes, I do,” she said.

He lifted himself up, ruffling his hair. And when he turned to her, his face was beaten. “What are we going to do?” he said.

Valerie looked for help where she could find it. She began reading every child care book she could find, but none of them ever seemed to quite apply to Karen. She cornered mothers with kids in the restaurant, but the mothers always seemed vaguely insulted when Valerie asked them if their kids ever had tantrums. The parents at the PTA meetings she and Roy now dutifully attended looked at Valerie with slight hostility. Karen had hit some of their own children. They acted as if Karen’s behavior were her fault, as if there were something she should be doing, but no matter how she asked, no one could tell her what that was.

“I’m not to blame,” Valerie cried in the car. Roy kept one arm about her as he drove to pick up Karen from Lee’s. “Of course you’re not,” he insisted. “Neither of us is.”

Lee was calm and unruffled. In the living room, Karen was curled onto a chair, “Come on, honey,” Valerie said to Karen, but Karen wouldn’t move. “Honey,” Valerie said, near tears again. “I want to stay here,” Karen said roughly. She wasn’t in the nice clean pajamas Valerie had sent over with her. She had on one of Lee’s T-shirts that said “I’d Rather Be Sailing,” and as far as she knew Lee hadn’t sailed once in her whole life. It was past ten and she had six chocolate cookies in her lap. Of course a child wouldn’t want to leave a home like that. Of course a child would gravitate toward a place like that the first chance she could. She studied Lee as if she had never seen her before. Lee was also wolfing cookies. She was barefoot even though everyone knew there were splinters in wood floors, and on Lee’s dusty floor there were also stray glasses, a coffee spoon, and God knew what else. Valerie straightened. She began to think that maybe Lee was the one who was at fault, that maybe Lee wasn’t such a good influence on her child, that maybe it had been a mistake to have been so grateful for her sitting.

Valerie determined to switch Karen’s alliance. She had expected things to come too naturally; she hadn’t tried hard enough. Well, she could be as spontaneous as Lee, as surprising, only she wouldn’t be giving her daughter cookies at eleven at night. She wouldn’t let her walk in the night.

One evening she hustled Karen into the car. “It’s a surprise!” she said. She drove ten miles, past Dairy Queen stands and shopping malls, Karen tense beside her. “Lean back, now,” she told her, gently lowering her against the seat, but as soon as she released her hold, Karen sprang forward again. “Guess where we’re going?” she said brightly.

“To Lee’s?” Karen said.

“No, not to Lee’s,” Valerie said crossly. “We don’t always have to go to Lee’s. There are lots of other things in this life than Lee’s.” Karen sank onto her seat.

Karen perked up when she saw the green-and-yellow neon in front of the roller rink. “What is it, what is it?” she said, and Valerie smiled. “You’ll see,” she said. She parked in front of the neon sign and helped Karen out.

Inside, Karen was even more dazzled. She cocked her head at the sound of the skates, She loved the flashing lighted board that announced LADIES CHOICE or MEXICAN HAT DANCE. Amazed, she held on to the wood banister and watched the skaters. Valerie paid for two pairs of skates, but Karen was so excited holding the small white leather skates that at first she didn’t want to let go of them for Valerie to slip them on her feet. She clung to Valerie’s hand while they skated. “This is fun!” she shouted over the tinny piped-in music.

They stayed for three hours. “More,” Karen cried, even though she could hardly keep her balance any longer. She lagged at the banister, As soon as the roller skates were off her feet she wobbled, taking Valerie’s hand. “We’ll do this lots more,” Valerie said, squeezing Karen’s fingers.

Valerie thought she had won her over, at least a little. The rest of the evening Karen played quietly, and when Roy came home she raced to meet him. “I roller-skated!” she shouted. “Well, we skated,” Valerie said, kissing Roy. “And how did we do?” Roy said, beaming. “I didn’t fall down once!” said Karen. She skated for him, in her bare socks, pale yellow anklets with blue violets on the cuffs. Her hair looked shiny and clean, and for once it wasn’t in her eyes. When Valerie touched her she didn’t pull back.

Valerie couldn’t stop Lee from dropping by the house, undoing all her good work. She told her it wasn’t a good time, but Lee ignored her. She told her to call first, but Lee never did. Sometimes she brought Andy, whose face was always a strange mixture of delight at being with her and annoyance at having to be at his sister’s. “Come on,” he said, tugging at Lee, But Lee was hard to remove. She took Karen into the backyard and crouched down with her and pointed out constellations in the sky.

“It’s too light. She can’t see them,” Andy said.

“Yes, I can,” Karen said. “There’s the Big Dipper.” She scribbled fingers in the blue sky.

“You’ve got a good imagination,” Andy said.

“The stars are there,” Lee said. “Whether you see them or not, they’re there.” She looked at Karen. “Wish on a star.”

“Yeah, well, we gotta get going,” Andy said.

Lee bounded up. “Okay, toots,” she said, kissing him, taking Karen by the hand.

Valerie saw how irritated Andy was with Lee when she insisted on staying longer than he wanted. He was a little irritated with Valerie, too, though. He came over some nights and sat in the kitchen with Roy and Valerie, all three of them sipping on glasses of table wine. He noticed how Roy never complained about Karen, how instead he’d just get silent. He’d look out the window into the distance as if there were something there of interest. Valerie, though, never stopped complaining. One night after Lee had refused to see a movie with him because she wanted to bake a surprise cake for Karen, he hinted that maybe Valerie shouldn’t go out. “A kid needs her mother,” he said.

Valerie’s gaze sharpened, “It’s not my fault those two are in love with each other. So don’t stick around here so much, Go someplace alone with Lee.”

“She talks about Karen all the time,” Andy said. “It’s like Karen’s with us even when she’s not.”

“Lee,” Valerie snorted. More and more she was angry with Lee. She somehow blamed her. She was determined to get other sitters, to change them so Karen wouldn’t have time to form an allegiance, but the first new one she tried, a junior high school girl who showed up with curlers in her hair, was nearly in tears when they came home, and behind her Karen was crying, too, standing in the midst of a pool of milk.

She vented her anger the best she could. She sniped at Lee for coming to work ten minutes late or for leaving early. At work, on a day so hot no one had the energy to set the red-checkered cloths on the tables, never mind cook, she made Lee make soup. “You’ve been here long enough to know how to make something,” she said. She hadn’t really cared one way or another whether there was soup or not, but she left Lee alone in the kitchen, afraid her soft heart would ruin everything. “Valerie?” Lee, face flushed, called her in. “Taste this,” she commanded. Valerie peered into a pot. “It’s cold,” Lee said. “Blueberry soup.” Valerie dipped in a spoon. The soup was cool and light and delicious. “You know,” Lee said, “I wouldn’t mind doing some cooking here.”

“I bet you wouldn’t,” said Valerie.

Andy knew Lee loved Karen, and sometimes he thought she loved him, too. She was always telling him so in his daydreams, always agreeing to marriage and a house, and kids, and a life that was going to start any minute. Awake, though, she got upset when he mentioned marriage, and the only thing she’d say about it was that she needed more time. All right. But he would use that time to his advantage. He would expose her to weddings so happy they would make her heart shatter with longing. He would be so funny and kind and loving that she couldn’t help but melt, All he had to do was wait for Lee to catch up with his plans. All he had to do was catch her at every wrong turn and bring her back to him, When she snapped at him, he told her jokes, When she was silent, he let her be.

And he did more than daydream. He began saving money in a special bank account. He began taking the long way to work, stopping in the suburban neighborhoods to look at the houses, and every time he spotted one with a “For Sale” sign on it, he imagined Lee inside it.

He knew how dependent on her Karen was, but he hadn’t realized it might be the other way around until one day, when Valerie and Roy whisked Karen off to the ocean. “We all need a vacation,” Valerie said. “My folks have a place on the Cape. It’ll be great,” she insisted.

Lee didn’t know what to do with herself. She missed Karen. Restless, unanchored, wired with resentment, she waitressed at the restaurant, slamming down wrong orders, adding up the tallies wrong, sometimes in the restaurant’s favor, sometimes in the customer’s. By midafternoon she was in the kitchen, badgering one of the cooks to let her help. Cutting carrots into thin curls, making flowers out of radishes, or simply stirring a silky sauce, made her relax. She cooked soups so cool and beautiful, she sometimes saw the customers studying their plates before they put a spoon into it. At home, unable to sleep, she stood in front of her stove and made lemon pies, dark meaty soups, and custards she never had the appetite to eat.

At night she walked alone. Exhausted, lonely, she settled into Jim’s old jacket and walked. Just like old times, she thought ruefully, digging her hands into the pockets. She thought about Jim for a minute, and then, without intending to, she suddenly thought about her own daughter. Joanna, the newspaper had printed her name. If she had thought she had a right to name her, she wouldn’t have named her that. Her daughter wouldn’t remember her the way Karen remembered her mother; her daughter had Jim, She wouldn’t need her. She was surprised at how much worse a thought like that made her feel, She turned back home.

Everything seemed suddenly to fray her nerves. She was now grateful for Andy’s calls, for the way he would whisk her off to a movie or out to dinner at a moment’s notice. One weekend he took her to the state fair. She had a good time. She held his hand, she kissed him, and if she bought fifty dollars’ worth of soft plastic souvenirs and plush toys, if she bought a T-shirt sized for a five-year-old, he said nothing. For Lee he bought a small globe with sparkles inside it. “I give you the world,” he told her.

Valerie and Roy and Karen were back within the week, but Lee didn’t feel less restless until Valerie walked into the restaurant, sunburned under a white piqué dress, her hair shored back with a white headband decorated with shells.

“Well, was it wonderful?” Lee demanded.

“Sure it was,” Valerie said. She examined one of the fruit mousses Lee was preparing. She didn’t want to tell Lee that Karen had stormed and sulked and refused to go near the ocean, that her own mother had never stopped criticizing the way she and Roy were with Karen. “If a child’s bad, the parents make it that way,” she pronounced. Roy and she baked on a beach littered with soda pop bottles and college kids on the make. The vacation hadn’t done one thing to bring anyone any closer. There was no air-conditioning in the cottage, and no one slept at night under the blanketing whine of the mosquitoes and Karen’s nightmares, which rang out in the still beachy air. As soon as Valerie saw home, all she wanted to do was be alone to walk through her restaurant and supervise things and not have to think about a cranky husband and a recalcitrant child. If Lee wanted to watch Karen nights, if Karen wanted Lee, Valerie was suddenly too tired to protest.

Karen had a plastic bag full of sand and shells that Valerie had collected for her. She had a soft rubber shark that squeaked when you pressed it, which Roy had bought for her. She had accepted the gifts but had shown no interest in either the shells or the shark, not until Valerie took her over to Lee’s. Karen excitedly packed her toys. “Well, better late than never,” Roy said, but Valerie just sighed. Why didn’t people belong to the ones who tried to love them?

After Roy and Valerie had driven away, Lee and Karen jiggled the bag full of shells and put the rubber shark in a bathtub full of water. For a moment she imagined Roy’s car hurtling down a dark road, Valerie pressed against a loosening door. But, no, she didn’t want them killed. Maybe they would run off to a second honeymoon and both get amnesia, and she could take Karen. There was a sudden, fleeting image of her own daughter, a faceless girl she could have passed on the street and not known as her own. She bent down to kiss Karen, and she was flooded with so much longing that she abruptly started to cry.

She shifted Karen off her lap and almost immediately felt empty. Alarmed, Karen stood up, faintly shivering. Lee swiped one hand across her running nose. “It’s all right,” Lee said. “I’ll be right back, darlin’,” she said. She left Karen trailing fingers into the soapy bathwater, and she went to the telephone in the kitchen. She pulled out the receiver, stretching the tangle of cord so she could still see Karen. Five years old, she thought. Five years. She dialed Information for Maryland, “Jim Archer,” she said.

“Archer,” the operator said. “Here it is: 555-8914.”

Lee stiffened. “That’s 555-8914,” the operator repeated.

For a moment she was crashing into time. How could he still be at the same number, at the same house? In a kind of hypnosis she dialed the number, and then a small voice answered. “Hello?” Lee, stunned, gripped the phone. Another voice, older, more resonant, wove in the background, a woman’s. “Honey, say ‘Hold on, please,’ remember, honey—”

“I have a red truck,” the voice said matter-of-factly to Lee. “I have two whole dolls. And I want a gerbil.”

“Hello?” a woman said. “Sugar, don’t touch that.” Her voice took on an adult tone again. “Hello, I’m sorry.” She was polite and cheerful. Lee slumped against the counter.

“Is Jim Archer there?” Lee said. Her voice sounded as if it were punched full of holes.

“He sure is,” she said. “Who’s calling, please?”

Lee crashed down the phone. Sick, she felt sick. She turned toward the sink. She could fill it with water. She could douse her head into it. She was about to twist the spigot when she saw Karen, silhouetted in the door, dangling the dripping shark from her hand, her eyes luminous with tears. “I thought you left!” she cried.

Lee moved toward Karen, crouching down, drawing Karen against her. “I’m right here,” she said. Karen wound her two hands so tightly around Lee’s neck that for a moment she felt completely lost, and it was only when she felt a tremor moving inside her heart that she knew it must be breaking.

“I thought I was alone!” Karen said, crying a little harder. Lee stroked her hair, a headful of dark strands, not blond, not fair like her own—like her daughter’s.

“Would I do that?” Lee said, and tilted Karen’s chin so she could see her. Then she tickled Karen behind her ears, waiting until her face bloomed into a smile, until she could study her and study her and never for one single moment ever believe she had been crying.

They were driving to the aquarium, and already Valerie and Karen were fighting. Karen kept trying to undo her seat belt. “You and Daddy don’t have yours on,” she accused.

“We’re adults. We’re ready to die. You’re not,” Roy said, turning the wheel. Valerie flashed him a look.

“I hate this seat belt,” Karen said, pouting.

“What do you think we’ll see at the aquarium?” Valerie coaxed, brightening her voice. “Monkeys? Rocket ships?”

“They have tiger fish,” Roy said. “Imagine that. Do you think they roar?”

Karen, in the back seat, unclipped her belt. She slid over to the window. The houses blurred past her.

“Andy tells me he’s thinking of going out to California for a vacation. He wants to take Lee with him.”

“I don’t know why she doesn’t just marry him,” Valerie said. “My brother’s a doll. I’d even marry him.”

Karen looked up. “I want to visit Lee,” she said.

Valerie shut her eyes. “Not today, peaches,” she said.

“Today,” Karen said.

“But, baby, we’re going to the aquarium!” Roy said, twisting around. “Look what you did,” he said, and briskly clipped her back into her belt, tightening it so she couldn’t move.

They left the aquarium a little over an hour after they had arrived. Karen had started kicking another little boy near her, until Valerie had yanked her by her arm. “That’s it,” she said furiously. “We’re going home.” She half dragged Karen out the door. “No more tiger fish, no clown fish,” she said. “You understand what that means, no clown fish?” Karen slapped one hand along the wall.

The whole drive home Karen clamored for Lee. “It’s too late, we’re going home,” Roy said. Karen kicked at the seat. “It isn’t,” she said.

“Don’t kick the seat,” Roy said.

“The way you’ve behaved, you’ll be lucky if you see her by next month, Lady Jane,” Valerie said. “I’m sick of this, I really am, I do everything and this is the thanks I get.”

Karen’s mouth snapped shut. She edged toward the window, squeezing her eyes shut so the colors blurred the world into another place. When the car passed Lee’s block, she stiffened. She tried to catch Roy’s eyes in the rearview mirror, but he was looking straight ahead. He swerved into the turn toward home. She didn’t move until Roy had parked the car back in front of the house.

“Into the house until supper,” Valerie said. She was going to make something easy, something adult. Pasta and clam sauce, Karen, she thought meanly, could just eat the pasta plain or with butter. Or she could stay in her room and sulk until she was hungry enough for a peanut-butter sandwich. She strode into the kitchen and surveyed the open cupboard of food. Cilantro, she thought, and reached for the oblong green can.

Roy, face set, grabbed the paper from the porch and headed for the bedroom. He sprawled on the bed, his shoes hanging over the clean spread, and flipped through the entertainment section. He felt like seeing a movie, but not with Karen or with Valerie.

Neither one of them saw Karen getting her jacket, stepping lightly onto the front porch, and walking purposefully down the street. It wasn’t until nearly ten minutes later, when Valerie began making a tomato sauce out of guilt, that she thought to call Karen, and by that time Karen was nearly halfway to Lee’s.

She knew the way. She had walked it with Lee in nights so black she had to count her steps just to know where a curb was. Lee had told her it was Indian walking, that they were scouts staking out their territory. “Sight isn’t the only way you know something,” Lee told her. She had shown her how to know which direction a car was coming from just by the sound. She had taught her to find the gas station just by the smell of the gas. “You use all your senses, even the invisible ones,” Lee said. “Like sometimes you just feel someone’s behind you.” Karen started. She thought Lee meant the ghost or the way she sometimes smelled her mother’s perfume or heard her boots, She thought maybe Lee could tell her how to turn around so quickly her mother might still be there.

She hadn’t liked the aquarium. She hadn’t wanted to tell Valerie or Roy, but she had been afraid of the fish. Their mouths suctioning up against the glass, their white eyes staring at her, were like nightmares. “Look at this,” Valerie kept saying, edging Karen closer to the tank with the weight of her body. Roy pretended he didn’t care when she wouldn’t go up close to the baby shark tank, but she felt him watching her. Valerie kissed too hard, the way her mother’s friends had when her mother had asked them to. Her touch was angry. She jerked on Karen’s jersey; she smoothed Karen’s hair right down to the bone of scalp. Valerie and Roy punished her all the time. She waited for them to get tired of it, to send her home, to stop insisting they were her parents. They wouldn’t let her hang up the pictures she had drawn of her mother. They wouldn’t let her talk about her. Behave, they said. Behave. She banged her feet across the wood floor; she threw a spoon so hard that her mother could hear and trail it clear across the country.

Karen recognized the street by the sound of the cars. There up ahead was the stop sign. Lee had made her practice stopping in front of the sign. Look all ways, she had said. Cars don’t have eyes. You do. Karen widened her eyes. Two cars passed, whizzing so fast she heard a smear of music, and then she saw Lee, standing at the far end of the road, resting on a rake, talking to Andy.

She looked in back of her to check traffic. Two cars were coming, and she stopped, patient, the way Lee had told her to. She was rocking on the heels of her red sneakers when she saw a third car coming toward her, a flash of red skidding to a stop so sudden, she bounced from the curb.

She could see Valerie’s head poking out of the front window, and Valerie suddenly jerked open the front door, hinging out her legs. “Karen!” Valerie shouted. The sound made Lee start. She set down the rake and was suddenly striding toward Karen, trying to cross the busy street. Lee waved her arms at Karen.

Panicked, Karen looked back at Lee, and then she began running into the street. In front of her Lee was zigzagging through traffic toward her. In back of her she saw Valerie, her face as pale and white as a slice of moon, and for a moment it seemed as if Valerie were running toward Lee and not toward her at all.

She didn’t see the car. Her blood was coursing through her like electric current. A car horn sang in her ear. Valerie made a sudden lunge, and Karen bolted back, turning toward Lee, slamming into the sudden path of a blue sedan that arced her up into the air, and the whole time she could hear her own breath, like the heady rush of wind from the back of a motorcycle.

Valerie had refused to leave the hospital. She kept asking every nurse who walked by if there had been some mistake about her daughter. She kept trying to go into the room where they had brought Karen, even after the nurse told her that Karen’s body had already been removed.

Valerie nudged Roy’s hands from her, circling the waiting room, sitting down on one of the turquoise plastic chairs and then rising up again every time a doctor approached. “Come on, baby,” Roy said. “Come on, Please.” She looked at him blankly and then sat down on one of the chairs again.

She couldn’t quite remember. Details kept shifting, jumbling in sequence. She remembered the car, how it had fishtailed to a stop with a scream of tires. She remembered the driver, a weeping middle-aged woman in a bow-blouse suit, who braced her body against the hood of her car as if she were an ornament. She remembered being frozen, too, encased in a kind of force field. She kept thinking. If I don’t move, nothing more will happen. She remembered Karen hitting the pavement in a spasm of blood, and then she remembered Karen limp in Lee’s arms, a bright spreading star of crimson on Lee’s white shirt. When the ambulance came, the driver had put a hand on Lee’s shoulder, crouching down, whispering, as intimate and shocking as a slap. Valerie moved through the force field. She grabbed on to the sleeve of the attendant. His limp black hair skidded into his face when he looked up at her. “My little girl,” Valerie said, the only words she knew, and the attendant stood up, pivoting from Lee, fading her into the background, and this time the arms he touched were Valerie’s.

She remembered Roy. His shirt had been pasted to his back, His hair and face had been so damp with sweat that he looked as though he had stepped from a shower, and when she had touched him, he had shaken beneath her fingers. Andy had been crying. His face was puffy with tears she hadn’t seen since he had been kicked off Little League when he was twelve. She hadn’t wanted them to touch Karen. She kept telling them that everyone knew you weren’t supposed to move people after an accident. “That rule’s for everyone but us,” one of the attendants told Valerie, crouching over her daughter like a shroud. They wouldn’t let her ride in the ambulance until she threatened to sue them, and the whole ride there she kept one hand on Karen, in a way Karen never would have permitted if she had been aware. “I’m here,” Valerie said.

She didn’t remember the others arriving, only that they had somehow always been here, always been crying, too, it seemed. Lee slumped against Andy. Valerie looked at him, and he carefully extricated himself from Lee and went to his sister, crouching before her. “Hey,” he said.

“I can’t leave,” she said.

“Sure you can. You can leave with me,”

“No, I can’t,” she said, but then he was lifting her up, her weight braced against his arm. She wasn’t aware of moving, but the hospital was trailing past her, one room seeming to blend right into the next until they were at the back emergency doors, and for a moment Valerie was pinned in place. “It’s all right,” Andy said, and pushed at the door, leading her into the cold night. “There’s a million stars out,” Valerie said in amazement. “Oh, God, it’s a clear night.” She twisted in Andy’s grip, turning around a little, stumbling against Roy and Lee, and as soon as she saw the starry stain of blood, rusted on Lee’s white blouse, she remembered everything all over again.

“Get her away,” Valerie said, her voice hard and shiny.

“Valerie,” said Lee.

“Get her away from me,” Valerie said. She began shaking, trying to wrench from Andy’s grip.

“It’s all right,” Andy said. He soothed Valerie back around so she was facing the night. “Let’s just get you home first,” said Andy. He let her walk on ahead by herself, and then he turned to Lee, who had her arms bundled about her as if she were freezing.

Awkwardly he rubbed her forearms. “Here. Take the keys. Get a cab and go to my place. I’ll be there as soon as I can.” Baffled, she stepped back from him. “I’m supposed to go?” she said.

“No, just for a minute,” he said. “Just a minute. Just so I can tend to my sister and Roy. She’s in a state. And I have to make sure they aren’t alone in the house. I have to make calls.”

“I can’t be there?”

“Lee—she’s in shock. Every time she looks at you, it upsets her.” He smoothed back her hair. “Give it time.”

Lee started to cry. She turned to look back at Valerie, who deliberately shut her eyes. Lee abruptly took the keys from Andy, but when he bent toward her she moved from him so that all he was touching was air.

He worried about her the whole drive home. Flushed with guilt and grief, he made the turns toward Valerie’s home. He knew how much she had loved Karen, but Valerie was his sister, Valerie was the mother. And he had told her to go to his place. He knew if she went home, she’d be surrounded by Karen’s pictures on her refrigerator, by the toys she kept for her. His place, at least, would be full of him. He looked at his watch. The first call he’d make would be to her.

He drove Valerie and Roy home in silence. He saw Valerie flinch when the car pulled into the driveway. There was a tricycle in the front yard, a muddied blue ball by the side. The dining room table was set for three. He made them come into the kitchen and sit around Valerie’s huge oak table while he made the calls. He called Lee first, feeling a flicker of fear when she didn’t pick up. Then he called everyone he knew. He told them the same thing, but every time he said it, it didn’t feel any truer. He called Roy’s parents, he called his own, and when his mother answered he burst into tears.

Roy stood up. “Excuse me a minute,” he said, and walked out of the room.

When the first knock came, the first people, for a moment Andy kept thinking it might be Lee. He waited until there were at least a dozen people in the house. Waitresses, cooks, friends, all of them orbiting edgily around the kitchen. Someone had brought a platter of fruit, still encased in crinkled paper. Someone else had brought a bag of groceries and was chopping in the corner. He walked over to Valerie, who was sitting perfectly still, her hands folded schoolgirl style in her lap.

“I’m going now,” he told Valerie, bending to kiss her hair.

“I know,” she said.

“You let me take care of the details, all right?”

“Yeah.”

“You call any time of night,” he said. “I’ll be here first thing in the morning.” He looked at her. “You want me to stay?”

“No, You go.” She frowned. “Roy hasn’t come out of the bedroom all evening.”

“You want me to go get him?”

“No. Let him be alone.”

He nodded and then Marielle, one of the cooks at the restaurant, came over and promptly burst into tears. “Oh, honey,” she wept, and rocked Valerie into an embrace.

He drove past Lee’s apartment on the way to his, peering up at her dark windows. When he got to his house he rang the bell, half hoping Lee might answer the door. Instead, though, he jiggled the key into the lock himself. He entered an apartment so dark, it made him feel helpless. He didn’t realize Lee was there until he started to walk toward the phone, and then he heard her, crying in the bathroom. “Lee?” he said.

She was in the bathtub, her arms about her knees, her face so swollen it seemed as if flesh had been puttied on. As soon as he saw her, he felt wounded. “Come on,” he said. He bent and lifted her up into the one clean towel he had, and then he led her, as if she were blind, to the bedroom, her wet feet making prints on the dark wood floor. “Okay now,” he said, and lowered her to his bed and stretched out beside her, stroking her hair, her face, the hollows just under her chin. “Talk to me,” he said, but she kept choking. The shoulders of his shirt were wet with her tears. “Just get it out,” he said, but no matter how much he coaxed, she couldn’t seem to tell him anything at all.

He felt like a voyager between two planets. The first thing he did when he got up was go see his sister. There were always people in the house. Valerie cried nonstop, talking incoherently about Karen, blaming Karen’s wild mother, blaming the adoption agency and herself, and almost always blaming Lee. “She lured her,” Valerie said. She looked up at Andy.

“She didn’t lure her,” he said, “We were talking, planning a vacation.”

“Hah,” said Valerie. “Lee go on a vacation with you.”

“Val,” he said.

“Shut up,” she said. “Don’t tell me. You’re blind.”

“Come on. Let’s go sit on the porch. It’s cooler.”

“Karen was running to me, Andy.”

“I know,” he said. “I know she was.”

He was exhausted most of the time and constantly worried. He didn’t like the way Lee was grieving, as terribly and as hard as his sister. He’d get to Lee’s house and she’d be wobbling on her feet. “I can’t sleep when you aren’t here,” she whispered. She listed toward him, and as soon as her head rested against his shoulder, she seemed already to be dreaming. He put her to bed, and as long as he was aside her she slept, but all he had to do was get up to get water and she would bolt upright, alarmed.

He wasn’t used to her needing him so much. “Talk to me,” he said. “You have to talk about it.” But every time he even started to probe, she wrenched from him. “I loved her,” Lee said. “And I thought Valerie was my best friend.”

“You’ve got to give her some time.”

Lee faced him. Her skin was so pale it seemed to shimmer. “What about me?” she said.

“Well, it’s different,” he said. “She wasn’t your little girl.”

Lee flinched. She bent to scoop up her sweater from the dusty floor, tugging it onto her arms.

“Where’re you going?” he said.

She didn’t look at him. “What are you doing?” he said. She shoved up the sleeves of her sweater. “You’re right,” she said, crying. “She wasn’t.” And then, abruptly, she walked out his door.

Roy had refused to hold any sort of service or funeral, Karen was to be cremated, and as far as he was concerned the place could keep her ashes. He didn’t want to be there, and he didn’t want Valerie to be there, either. The day of Karen’s cremation he set the alarm for five in the morning. In a morning white with fog, they threw on jackets and got in the car, so that by the time the sun was burning off the haze, they were out of the state altogether. All they did that day was drive, the radio bebopping Top 40 hits, the two of them switching off driving every few hours. Neither one of them spoke or pointed out sights or did anything but look straight ahead. They stopped at Howard Johnson’s to use the bathrooms and to buy cans of Coke they didn’t really drink, and when they passed families with kids Valerie would avert her face. It wasn’t until the sun was setting that he turned around and started the drive back again, taking his time, gauging the trip so that they wouldn’t be back until the next afternoon altogether.

He knew it was different with Valerie, but Karen was burned out of him. All he cared about now was what he had always cared about. Valerie. He had all these plans. What else was there to do with the time but make plans? He shaped a future for them. He was moving her to California, to stay with his parents, who had a house right on the beach. The salt air could sting memory away. They’d both have enough time to find new jobs, create lives. He could sell the restaurant and use the money to start up a new one if that was what Valerie wanted. He had closed the place for a month, but he could reopen it, let it run itself for a while, and give her time to decide. The best thing about California was the fact that there were no seasons. He wouldn’t have to shore up against any other fall. He wouldn’t have to avoid looking at a leaf burnished with color for the way it would make him sick. No, there’d be one long, endless, dazzling summer. A marking of time that was completely in place.

He took care of his wife. Every night he lay with her resting against his shoulders, and every time she told him what a bad mother she had been, he hushed her. “Listen,” he murmured. He told her bedtime stories about the lives they were going to be leading. He talked to her the way he had talked to Karen, paring down his language, softening his tone. “We can start a whole new restaurant,” he told her. “We can call it East Coast California. You like that? Or maybe just California East. We’ll serve bagels. We’ll import waitresses from New York who’ll be so rude they’ll charm the customers.” Valerie half smiled. “We’ll both tan,” he promised. “We’ll get a large rangy dog and make it wear a red bandanna about its neck.” She smiled again. “A blue bandanna,” she said. “I like blue.” She trailed two fingers along the side of his face, as tender as if his skin were glass. The stories seemed to calm her, and when he caught sight of her face, she looked almost as if she believed him, and eventually she would fall asleep.

Every time Lee called Valerie, Valerie would hang up on her. She was in bed with Andy one evening when he told her that Valerie and Roy were planning on moving. “They need the change,” he said.

“Oh, no,” Lee said. She moved closer to him, wrapping one arm about his hip. He hated himself for it, for almost basking every time she clung to him. He recognized the grief in her need, but sometimes, too, he told himself he recognized something else, something quite different.

“They’re selling the restaurant,” he said.

Lee got out of bed, tossing the coverlet over Andy.

“Hey, they’re not selling it right now,” Andy said.

Lee was pulling eggs out of the refrigerator, a mixing bowl from under the sink. Andy simply sat on one of Lee’s chairs and watched her bake. She was a good cook. He could already recognize the things on Valerie’s menu that were hers just by tasting them. There was always some mysterious ingredient he couldn’t pinpoint. He rested his chin on the edge of the chair. She had a dot of flour on her chin. “Lemon upside-down cake,” she said.

“What’s the secret ingredient?” he said, but she was pushing the cake tins into the oven, and even after the cake was frosted and cooling under a bonnet of waxed paper, when they were both back in bed, she wouldn’t tell him.

Lee took the cake to Valerie’s the next day, before even one car was in front of the door. Lee rang the bell, but when Valerie saw Lee, her face shut in upon itself. Lee held out the cake pan awkwardly, keeping her arms stretched until finally Valerie opened the door.

“Andy told me you’re leaving next week,” Lee said. “Don’t go. Don’t do it.”

Valerie stepped back toward the house.

“Andy’ll give me your address,” Lee said.

“I guess Andy will give you whatever you want,” Valerie said. She wrapped her hair about her hand, knotting it.

“I’m going to write you,” Lee said. “I don’t care what you say. I’m going to keep writing and one of these days you’ll write me back. I know it.”

“There’s the phone,” Valerie said, but there was no sound. “You were my first real friend,” Lee said. Valerie stood perfectly still for a moment. “Don’t you believe me?” Lee cried, and then Valerie quietly took the cake.

“Don’t throw the cake out,” Lee said. “Please. Eat it. It has six eggs in it.” Valerie looked down at the cake in her hands and then, turning, finally shut the door.

They left before the house was even sold. Andy had hired an agent to take care of things. Lee felt as if there were a fissure in time, All Lee could think about was her father wandering happily with her through rooms other people had lived in. Perfect for a child, he used to say, pushing Lee forward with a touch so gentle that even now, remembering, it made her yearn.

Lee began going back to work, The restaurant had been sold to an accountant, who wanted it only as a tax shelter. He showed up one day with Andy, following Andy so gingerly into the kitchen that it seemed as if he had done something wrong. He was young and sloppy, and he kept shrugging, “Meet the new owner,” Andy said, “Hank Malorian.” Lee stopped stirring a sauce. The waitresses clumped together. “Nothing’s going to change,” Hank said. He had kept the original name. He didn’t fire or hire one new person. “The head chef, he’s in charge now,” Hank said, pointing to Rico, a twenty-four-year-old Spanish expatriate who had already published a cookbook on greens. Hank told them he had no intention of ever coming to the restaurant at all, because the embarrassing truth was that he really preferred to eat at home. He made his hands a semicircle. “I know investments. You guys know restaurants.”

Nothing changed, but everything changed. The old customers kept coming, but new ones, having read about Karen in the papers, came, too, out of curiosity at first and then because they liked the food. Lee couldn’t risk standing idle for one single moment, so she began doing more than waitressing. Whenever she could she busied herself cooking. Reckless, she threw herself into projects, lulled by the rhythms of the kitchen, never really thinking if a recipe might work. Some of them did, enough so that all Rico had to do was take a taste and want it on the menu. “You take risks,” he told her, tasting the roasted red pepper soup she had made. “Keep on surprising me like that and I’ll make you second chef. How’d you like that? A career, not just a job.” She flushed with pleasure.

What’s in this? he asked her, but when she shrugged he became annoyed. “Memory. That’s all recipes are. And if you don’t remember, you won’t ever be able to have this delicious dish again. And neither will anyone else. You start remembering. That’s part of your job description.”

She remembered. At five o’clock she couldn’t go outside the kitchen because every time the door opened, it would remind her. She would almost swear she saw a small dark head. She walked past Valerie’s house, and although there was a new blue station wagon parked neatly in the drive, she expected the front door to slap open any minute, for Valerie to run across the lawn and embrace her.

She remembered the accident, taking it apart second by second. If she had not been raking, would Karen be alive? If she had run faster, if she had shouted louder. She kept thinking about this thing she had once read in one of Jim’s science books. Something about the new physics. Something about probable universes. Every event had several probable outcomes, and every one of those outcomes could somehow be occurring somewhere in space and time. Karen, she thought. A probable Karen sidestepping a car to fling herself, hot and damp and churning with emotion, into Lee’s embrace. A probable Karen growing up close to Lee. A probable Valerie staying the best of friends. A probable Lee who was anything but what she was—miserable and lost and seeming to fade from life.

Every day she felt herself growing smaller, more compact. She needed less air to breathe. She had to remind herself to eat, and even then, after a few forkfuls, she was stuffed. Her jeans bagged so that she dug a new hole in the belt she used to cinch them with. Her skin seemed translucent, as if you could see the heartbeat beneath it. Sometimes now, when Andy touched her, she couldn’t even feel him. “You all right?” he whispered, concerned. She rolled in his arms when he made love to her, but she didn’t feel herself participating. “I’m fine,” she said, but she was helpless, traveling away from him, so fast that even if he had tried to, he couldn’t have managed to stop her.

It hurt her even to look at Andy. Already she saw shadowy images of other women at his side, women from a probable universe who deserved him, women who didn’t belong to their memories. She should have turned away from him the first time he had thought he could rescue her, pulling her from the heavy blank white of a storm.

She didn’t know what had happened. It was impossible, but suddenly she didn’t see Karen anywhere. When other children came into the restaurant, they didn’t remind her of Karen. When she passed a school yard, she wasn’t drawn to every crop of dark hair jumping rope, to every tomboy scuttling on hands and knees. Instead she suddenly saw a world full of blond little girls, of shy little voices talking about gerbils, Instead she saw her daughter.

She lay awake at night and thought about her. Joanna. She remembered the voice, as high and thin as a wire. She wished she had held her when she had been born—she never would have left her then. She would have known her daughter’s scent, the texture of her skin and the blue of her eyes. If she had given herself two seconds with her baby daughter, she never would have been able to escape.

Now when she made desserts in the restaurant, they weren’t for Karen anymore, they were for Joanna. She made cupcakes in the shapes of clowns; she put extra powdered sugar in the frosting. Karen hadn’t been hers, but Joanna was. If they were together, she could hold her in her arms and feel another heart beating up against hers. If they were together, she could look into those eyes and see back into a past that connected them both. And a future. She lightened.

She began dreaming about Joanna. She hadn’t left the hospital at all. She had gone home with her baby and with Jim. She and the baby had piled into the car and driven to see her father, and as soon as he saw Lee holding her baby, he had burst into tears. He had pushed past Janet to welcome them into his home. She sometimes dreamed about Joanna’s room in Jim’s house. She never saw Jim, but she saw herself sitting on the edge of a small white bed, next to a small child, and she was singing. When she woke up she was so weak with longing, she couldn’t get up from the bed. Lying there, she thought about Joanna, and then she realized she couldn’t remember what she had been singing in the dream. She didn’t know any real songs, she couldn’t remember any from Claire, and she knew she had never sung to Karen. And that afternoon she went to the library and took out a children’s record. She played it late at night, humming along, memorizing, and when she went to bed she lay there singing “I Went to the Animal Fair” and “The Ash Grove,” her low clear voice soothed over her like a blanket, lulling her to sleep.

She began to hum and sing the songs more and more.

“What are you singing?” Andy said, amused. “I swear I hear ‘Bah Bah Black Sheep.’”

“It’s just something I remember,” she told him.

She began to wear her memories like a weight. She still loved cooking, but somehow it became muddied. She’d see a child’s fingerprints in the pie she was making; she’d hear a child’s laugh just to the right of the stove, a presence calling her so strongly, it hurt her. She stopped what she was doing and pressed her hands about her head. “You don’t look like you feel so hot,” one of the other cooks told her. “Why don’t you go home. I’ll cover for you.”

“Thanks,” Lee said. She started walking home, thinking it might clear her head, but every block there suddenly seemed to be a new travel agency started up. She kept spotting people carrying suitcases or speaking in East Coast accents. A little girl in a cherry-red coat skipped alongside her tall blond mother.

That night, when she saw Andy, she instantly began crying. He rolled her in his arms. “Let me see that pretty face,” he said. He gently swiped at her tears. “Tell me what’s wrong.”

She lifted her chin, snuffling. Her tears were pooling against his T-shirt.

“Did something happen at the restaurant?” He tickled her under her chin. “You want me to go beat up the new owner?”

She half smiled and shook her head. To amuse her he started humming the parts of “The Ash Grove” he remembered her singing. She laughed a little, and then she sat up, studying him. “Do you think I’m a bad person?” she said finally.

He grinned. “Absolutely,” he said. “The most evil I’ve ever met.” He kissed strands of her hair. “What’s this about, Lee?”

“I don’t know. I’m just a little blue,” she said, lowering her gaze from his. She lay against him, heartbeat to heartbeat, and she wanted to ask him. What happened to people if they decided to suddenly reappear after years of disappearance? She wanted to know if leaving your baby was a crime you could be put in jail for, if coming back for her was equally criminal. She had a million terrifying questions she wanted to ask, a million terrifying things she wanted to tell him, but no matter how much she wanted to, she couldn’t. How could she trust someone she had been lying to for so long, how could she ever think he might ever forgive her?

Andy owned stacks of law books, but instead she went to the library. She wouldn’t bring any of the books to the tables but instead stood in the aisles, balancing one heavy text after another, trying to find out if she were still legally her daughter’s mother. She read through forty different custody cases, ending up more confused than when she began. She was afraid to call a lawyer. She didn’t know who knew Andy and who didn’t, who might have known she was Andy’s girlfriend, who might casually ask Andy how come she was so interested in custody and abandoning mothers all of a sudden.

The more she thought about Joanna, the more she began thinking about her father and about Jim, too, and the more she thought, the more real they became to her, as if they were hurtling through time toward her. Had they waited at train stations, thinking she might be coming home? Did they ever do the same things out of habit, like a ritual, the way she set out cookies at four for Karen, thinking, Somehow this must be a mistake, this must not be the way the afternoon was going to end, turning into silence, solidifying into an evening so endless it was all you could do to get through it. Did her daughter ever feel a kind of odd nameless yearning toward a picture of a woman everyone said was her mother?

When she thought of Jim, a sudden river of grief and pity swelled within her. She kept remembering his sad, slow face, the face she had helped to create. The only way she could ever give him back those years was to tell him about her half of them.

It terrified her. She lay awake at night thinking what might happen if she went back, what might be the scenario. Sometimes she saw herself walking up to her father’s door, and then abruptly her father would strike her, just as if she had been seventeen. Sometimes she’d see Jim bolting the door against her, or else he’d stare at her uncomprehending, as if he had been looking for her so long, he no longer knew who she was at all. Sometimes she saw Joanna running to her and sometimes running away. But the thing was, once she saw herself holding her daughter, she couldn’t think of one single event past that.

It made her tired. She’d sit down to dinner with Andy, and it seemed to her as if there were always a ghost or two insistently dining with them.

“Hey, you don’t have to keep getting up. You’re not playing waitress with me,” Andy told her. She laughed. “Oh, it’s fine,” she said. She couldn’t tell him she kept getting up because of the way her past wouldn’t let her present continue.

It was too hard. She was too weak and cowardly to barge back into lives she had once left for good. She had Andy. She had a job. A home. And then she’d think of Karen, staring at a motorcycle that looked like her mother’s, and she’d think of her own daughter, a girl she had never once looked at, a girl who had nothing more of Lee than photos, and then she’d know there was nothing else to do but to go.

The next evening, right after work, she stopped at a travel agency. It was half-empty. A woman with black hair severely pulled back with a rhinestone clip nodded at Lee. “Where to?” she said.

“Baltimore,” Lee said. “No. No. Philadelphia first. Then a flight on to Baltimore.”

The woman’s head dipped. She pecked out something on a computer and squinted at it.

“Round trip?” the woman said.

Lee was silent for a moment. The air suddenly seemed to have weight. Anything could happen. “One way,” Lee blurted.

She had three weeks before she left, but already she felt herself traveling back through time. The past shimmered and expanded before her, crowding out her present. She could be walking by the maple trees out front, and all she would smell was the lilacs and the wisteria that were growing in the Baltimore backyard she remembered. She couldn’t help but get lost because if she didn’t look really closely the street signs now bore names like Eutaw Place and Hughs Avenue instead of Miffland and University and Oakes.

If anyone had asked her, if she had been able to talk about it at all, she would have said it was a relief. It was easier to wear your past like sudden new blinders, easier not to see too clearly just what it was that might not be waiting for you if you came back, because then leaving might wound you so much, you might never be able to continue.

Andy came over to cook her dinner, and the whole time he was cutting vegetables she sat dreaming on a chair in the other room, half hearing the conversation he was making. When she sat down to eat, she toyed at the salmon he had made, she stared out the window.

“Do you want to tell me what’s going on?” Andy said. “Don’t make me ask what’s wrong fifty times.”

“Nothing’s wrong,” she said.

“Do you think that helps either of us?”

She set down her fork, angled on the plate, a signal she had learned to recognize when she was waitressing, a sign that the meal was finished.

“I have to go away,” she said finally, not looking at him.

“Away? Why?” he said.

She looked down at her plate. Already she was traveling. She concentrated on the hum of the plane beneath her.

“Are you coming back?”

“I don’t know.”

“Can I come with you?”

“No,” she said.

“I don’t believe this!” he said. “Why are you going? Aren’t you going to tell me?” He waited, and when she was still silent he turned away from her.

“What’s happened to us?” he said desperately. “You still care about me. I know you do.” He stroked her hair, and as soon as she felt his hands, she couldn’t help herself, she didn’t care how much it was going to hurt later when she remembered, she leaned against him. “I do,” she said.

“So what is it?” he cried. “What’s going on?”

“Look, I—” She stumbled. Every time she looked up and saw his face, she felt something crumbling. “Don’t you think I love you?” she said finally.

“Then why are you going?” he said.

She looked down at her hands. “I have to go,” she said. “I have to take care of something. It just can’t wait.”

“What? What something?”

“Please,” Lee said. He looked at her, completely baffled. “Lee—” Then he stopped. He traced one finger along her chin.

“Okay, you don’t have to tell me. But whatever it is, it doesn’t matter,” he said. “Believe me, it doesn’t. We’ll work it out together.”

Lee felt herself tottering at the edge of something dangerous. She could reach out her hand and touch his face. She could wrap herself about him and he’d hold her and rock her and love her and never ever ask her one single question she didn’t want to answer, and if she could let it go at that, they could be happy. She could learn to look the other way every time she saw a small blond child. She could learn not to look at a map too closely or a crowd scene on the news. One more step and she might never be able to get back. She looked at Andy. She smelled the lime after-shave he sometimes used. The kitchen tell into a focus so dazzling, she felt dizzy. Exhausted, she rested her head against Andy’s shoulder.

“Don’t go,” he whispered. An image flickered in her mind, Karen standing in her kitchen holding a dripping plastic shark. “I thought you had gone!” she had cried. And then, in that moment, it didn’t matter how much she was going to miss Andy, how much it was going to hurt. It mattered only that she find her rather and Jim and her daughter again, it mattered only that she somehow fix things so she could stop running, so she would never again be in this position, where someone was having to beg her and beg her not to go.

“I’m sorry,” she told him, her voice a whisper.

“Well then,” Andy said, pained. He resettled on his chair, and as soon as he moved away from her, she felt him becoming dimmer. “I guess, then, I have to go now, too.”

The week before she left, Andy turned icy with civility. He had thought she was just angry, that she wasn’t really going to leave. Even when he saw the suitcase, he still had thought it was just acting out. Cases could be unpacked, after all, tickets returned. When he caught her shivering by the window, her palms pressed against the chilly glass, he sometimes would try to take her shoulders. “I guess you think I’m going to ask you where the hell you’re going, but I’m not,” he said. Something flickered in her face, a look he recognized from false witnesses in his courtroom.

He couldn’t quite bring himself to ignore her, because every evening he thought might be his last with her, which terrified him, but he never for a moment thought it might be terrifying her as well. He began missing her, sometimes the most when she was right there beside him. They ate long silent dinners in good restaurants, where he insisted she order desserts she barely touched. They sat numb in movie theaters, a small bucket of greasy popcom uneaten between them. Around them couples whispered and laughed too loudly or got up during the second plot point. They sat perfectly still until the closing credits were over. Sometimes they were the last people in the theater, and when they got up neither one of them could remember much about what had gone on on the screen, and then he took her home.

He never went home himself, though. He parked the car a block away from her house, willing himself to stay awake, to make sure she wasn’t leaving. Once, not more than ten minutes after he had seen her enter her house, he saw her leave it again. She was burrowing into her leather jacket, and he bolted out of the car, ready to follow her. She was halfway down the street when she turned abruptly, watching him. Her eyes were luminous. Her hair showered down her back. “I’m just walking,” she said stiffly. He was so humiliated he backed away from her, nodding curtly. Then he took the car, but he went to an all-night supermarket. There were only four or five other people in there, two couples and a young woman dressed all in black who kept giving him sharp, hopeful stares. He was methodical, grabbing a steel cart, pushing it down each and every aisle, and never taking one single item from one single shelf. It took him only twenty minutes to peruse the entire market, and then he replaced the cart carefully and walked outside again. He couldn’t go back to Lee’s, not that evening, so instead he went back to the courtroom and in the silence looked through cases. There were laws, things made sense. People who lied were punished.

The night before Lee was to leave, he came home drunk. He had performed a wedding just that day, to a couple so in love they had kissed through the whole ceremony. They had been so oblivious that they hadn’t seen the stricken look on his face. Lee could smell the alcohol, she saw it reeling in his walk as he came toward her. His face was tight and miserable and angry, and for one instant, it was all she could do to not touch him, to not give up or take him with her. Instead she flattened herself along the wall.

“I’m not going to be around when you get back,” he said.

“Come on, sit down,” she said.

“If you get back.”

She led him into the bathroom and hinged his legs down so he was sitting on the closed lid of the toilet. She drew him a bath. “Was I wrong to think we cared about each other?” he said. “Tell me. Was I wrong?” She couldn’t bear to look at him. She couldn’t risk being pulled back. She twisted, turning off the spigots, and started to undo his shirt. “Come on,” she said. “Please.” She refused to get in it with him, but she sat beside him while he soaked, and neither one of them looked at each other. He began splashing water into his face, so violently that she began to know he was crying. That night they slept naked in his bed, and although the bed was very small, they didn’t touch, and in the morning, when Andy woke up, his heart drowning within him, Lee was gone.

She almost turned around at least five times. She was suddenly paralyzed with fear that she was on a fool’s mission, that she might never see her daughter. It had been years. She had heard a woman’s voice on the phone, joking with Joanna, soothing. What kind of person had she been that she could just leave—and what kind of person was she that she could just come back? Maybe she’d just watch Joanna at a distance, make sure she was all right. Maybe she could talk to Jim in private, tell him that all she wanted was for her daughter to know that her mother was in the world.

She might never see her daughter. She might never see Jim. And she might never see Andy again. She should have told him the truth the day she had met him. She should have walked away from him the day she had first seen him. She boarded the plane to Philadelphia and her father, already missing Andy so much that she stumbled. She was so unsettled, the flight attendant asked her if she wanted an aspirin.