Читать книгу Wildwood - Drusilla Campbell - Страница 9

Thursday

Hannah Tarwater woke at dawn when a mockingbird trilled its lyric from the top of the eucalyptus tree outside her bedroom window. Through the half-open shutters she glimpsed another cloudless October sky and sighed. Last year the Santa Clara Valley had less than fifteen inches of rain, the year before just barely twenty. There hadn’t been a drop since early March, not even a sprinkle. She thought of Africa, of Oklahoma, of California lifted by the wind and deposited around the world, grit from her own garden drifting down over Mexico.

She reached behind her to the combination radio/ tape recorder and pressed the rewind button. When the whirring stopped, she pressed play and after a moment the sound of distant thunder and rain falling on leaves filled the shadowed bedroom. She closed her eyes and dozed a little.

Dan stirred and reached for her. Pulling her back against his chest, he nuzzled the nape of her neck and growled.

From down the hall an alarm’s nervy scream was followed by a feeble ding-a-ling as the clock hit the floor.

“Eddie’s awake,” Hannah said.

They listened for the ritual noise of their teenage son’s rising: the bedroom door flung wide, the bathroom door assaulted, the clang of the toilet seat hitting the tank, the torrent of pee. Flush. Clatter.

Dan tightened his embrace, cupping Hannah’s breast in his large warm palm. He kissed the nape of her neck.

She asked, “How’s your schedule look?”

“Routine. Big bellies and bawling babies.”

“Heaven, right?”

“Wrong.” He hugged her so tight she gasped. “This is heaven.” His hand slipped down the curve of her hip and between her thighs.

She elbowed him gently. “What’s going on down there?”

They heard another door open, footsteps, several sharp raps on the bathroom door, and listened to their seventeen-year-old daughter, Ingrid, announce to her younger brother that he would vacate the bathroom instantly if he knew what was fucking good for him.

Dan groaned and rolled onto his back. “That girl’s a Marine.”

“Hard to believe she was once a sweet-tempered baby. She was so quiet in the mornings, I sometimes forgot we had her. Remember how happy she was to lie in bed and play with her toes?” Hannah felt Dan’s body tense but she couldn’t stop herself. It was like picking at a wound, taking perverse pleasure in the pain. “And the way she used to talk to herself, making all those little nonsense noises with little question marks at the end? Remember, Dan?”

“Don’t start this, Hannah.”

“I’m just remembering.”

“You know what I mean.”

“You loved her.”

“I still love her.” In the shadowed room his eyes were cobalt blue. “I love Eddie too.”

“You loved being a Daddy.”

“And I still do.”

“I don’t mean teenagers. I mean babies and little ones.”

Dan groaned again and closed his eyes, cutting the line between them, disconnecting the fuse. Depression dived into bed beside Hannah, ignored Dan and tucked around her in the bedclothes, nuzzled up. Tears sprang to her eyes and she was suddenly furious.

There had been a time when she could wangle anything she wanted out of Dan. When he was a homely, shy and bony boy in medical school Hannah knew he couldn’t believe his luck that she loved him. Back then all he wanted to do was make her happy and keep her that way. Now, she asked herself, did he care? Did he give a good goddamn how she felt since time and good bone structure had turned him into a middle-aged hunk? His shyness had become a soft-spoken charm both men and women found attractive; and no one called him bony anymore. God forbid saying he was homely. The cowlicky brown hair, his hawkish nose and square jaw, these made a strong Yankee face, friends told her. You’re so lucky, Hannah. You got one of the good ones. They didn’t know how mulish he could be. Pigheaded and half-blind.

“It’s not like we’re too old, Dan. I know that’s what you think but it isn’t true. Fifty isn’t the same as it was for our parents. Besides, when I talked to the child advocate she said the court would waive the age requirement under the circumstances.”

“Jesus Christ, Hannah, you’ve been talking to the advocate?” Dan pushed back the bedcovers, swung his legs onto the floor and sat up. “How many times do I have to say it? I don’t want another baby.”

“But if you’d only come over to Resurrection House and take a look.” She knelt on the bed behind him, wrapping her arms around his chest, resting her cheek on his shoulder. Angry still but trying not to be, trying not to let it show. “If you’d just hold her . . .”

“I don’t want to hold her. Or see her. I don’t even want to hear her name.”

Angel.

Dan shrugged free of her, rested his elbows on his knees and held his head in his hands. “You’re driving me crazy with this, Hannah. I can’t take much more.”

Hannah put a plate of cinnamon toast before Eddie, neat little triangles overlapping like shingles. “You can’t go to school without breakfast. How do you expect to play football if you don’t eat?”

“Maybe he doesn’t want to play football.”

Ingrid stood by the back door and applied mascara while she waited for her ride. She was a strong athletic girl with her mother’s wild blonde hair and her father’s deep blue eyes spaced far apart. Healthy skin and perfect teeth, the smile that gleamed: she could have been an ad for the American Dream, Hannah thought. Ingrid would have been identified as American on any street in any foreign port.

Ingrid said, “Maybe he wants to be a computer nerd ’til the day he dies.”

“Shut up, Gridlock.”

“Of course he wants to play football.”

“Ma—”

“Eddie, trust me on this one, okay? Finish your oatmeal and eat your toast. Your body needs fuel. Even to move a joystick. Can I drive my car without gas?”

He stared at the toast as if it were contagious.

Tires crunched on the driveway. Ingrid grabbed her backpack and slung it over her shoulder. “I’m outa here.”

Hannah watched her long-legged daughter swing up into the open Jeep’s passenger seat and kiss the driver. Mix Hannah Whittaker with Dan Tarwater and you got this lithe and confident, smart-mouthed, sexual creature. Children were the strongest argument she knew of for the existence of God.

“Home by six,” Hannah called. “Aunt Liz’ll be here.”

Ingrid jabbed her thumb in the air as the Jeep roared out the driveway.

Back in the kitchen, Eddie stood in front of the open refrigerator eating leftover pepperoni pizza and feeding the crusts to Cherokee, the family’s Irish setter.

Hannah reached around him for the milk and poured a glass. “At least drink this. And sit down. People who eat standing up get high cholesterol.”

He took the milk from her, slammed the refrigerator shut with a backward kick and slumped in his chair. In shorts, his bare legs seemed to stretch halfway across the kitchen and the dark hair on them looked coarse as string.

Hannah leaned against the sink and watched him drink. The milky mustache on his upper lip made an unattractive contrast to the one starting to grow there naturally.

“Did you wash your hair this morning?”

“You always ask me that.”

“It doesn’t look like it.”

“I got oily hair, Ma. I can’t help it.” He muttered shit under his breath and she pretended not to hear.

Pick your battles, she thought. Living with teenagers taught a mother to think strategically. Or it should. Lately she couldn’t keep from picking at Eddie. Everything about him got under her skin and bit hard.

She squirted scouring glug into the sink and took a brush to the persistent coffee stains. Pregnant with Eddie, the smell of the stuff and its bilious blue-green color was all she needed to make her throw up. Now she enjoyed using it, took satisfaction from watching it foam up and the porcelain sparkle.

I am really pathetic.

She laughed aloud.

“Can you drive me to the card show tomorrow?”

“You’ve got school.”

“If I wait until Saturday all the good deals’ll be gone.”

“You’re not missing school for a sport card show.” Sometimes she scrubbed so hard the muscles across her shoulder tightened up like rubber bands on braces. “You’ve already got thousands of cards.”

“They’re an investment, Ma.”

“That’s what you tell me.” She rinsed the sink, turned and looked at her son.

He had pimples across his forehead like a relief map of the Sierras. Like his oily hair and incipient mustache and the dark hair on his legs, she disliked this sign of hormone activity. For some reason they put her against him. “Anyway, I’m always at Resurrection House on Fridays.” She held out his napkin.

He ignored it and wiped his mouth on his sleeve. “All you ever think of is that place.”

“They count on me three days a week, Eddie. I may be a volunteer, but it’s still a job.” She waved the napkin in front of his face.

He grabbed it and shoved it in a sterling silver ring with his initials on it. “Big deal,” he said.

“It is a big deal. If it weren’t for me and a few other women, the babies at Resurrection House would never get held or talked to or rocked. . . . When Angel came out of the hospital the drugs her mother used had practically destroyed her nervous system. I had to make her a special—”

“Yeah, I know.” Eddie headed for the door. “You told me about a million times.”

“Do you have your homework?”

“Gee, no, Ma.” He grinned and crossed his eyes. “I forgot.” His braces gleamed in the sunny kitchen.

For an instant Hannah saw in her tall awkward son a baby boy with a wicked grin, and her heart stopped. She reached out to touch him, but he ducked away just in time.

The phone rang as she was pouring soap in the dishwasher. She picked it up and held the receiver under her chin while she wiped the counters and straightened the bowl of flowers on the butcher block.

“I heard Paco’s Jeep.” Jeanne Tate lived and worked on the next property up Casabella Road: Hilltop School. She called Hannah almost every morning from her office.

“His name’s Frank.” Ingrid’s beloved had been ordinary Frank Pinelli until last year when he began calling himself Paco. Hannah knew the affectation irritated her illogically. She shouldn’t care what the kid called himself so long as he behaved around Ingrid. Maybe that was the problem. She knew he wasn’t behaving himself and neither was her daughter and she didn’t want to think about it.

“What time’s the flight?” Jeanne asked.

“Around noon. I have to check.”

“Well, it should be interesting.”

“It should be.” Hannah imitated her friend’s dry tone.

“Almost five years. I checked my old calendar.”

“We’ve seen her plenty in between.”

“I think it’s a little peculiar. She stays away—makes a point of staying away . . . Now all of a sudden and with no warning, she announces she’s coming home. Don’t pretend you’re not curious.”

“Who’s pretending?” Hannah knew perhaps too much about Jeanne’s life, but about Liz’s she didn’t know enough. She hadn’t even met the Frenchman she lived with. Gerard. Older and the son of a famous psychiatrist. Maybe he didn’t really exist. Liz had made him up. She had always hidden herself inside books and imagination. She knew how to lie. They all did.

Jeanne said, “I have to hang up in a minute. Parent interview. New kid all the way from Wisconsin.”

“How’s Teddy?” Teddy Tate, Doctor of Education, and Jeanne’s husband. Together they owned and ran Hilltop School.

“He has a headache. He’s lying in bed right now with an ice pack on his forehead.”

Hannah couldn’t manage to feel sorry for Teddy.

“It’s the dry weather. He’s had them on and off for weeks. Today’s the first time he’s stayed down. He’s being stoical mostly. Up and around, doing his projects, chasing his tail.”

“Better his own, than someone else’s.” It was a mean thing to say. “Sorry, Jeanne. Tell me about the Wisconsin kid.”

“Busy now.”

“Jeanne, I said I was sorry.”

“I know you’re sorry.” Implication: sorry comes easy for you, Hannah Tarwater. “Are we still on for Saturday night?”

“Did you hear me? I said I was sorry. You know the way I talk, I say—”

“And I assume we’re both welcome?”

“Jesus H. Christ.”

“Just checking, Hannah. Just checking.”

The phone line clicked dead.

Hannah stared at the receiver in her hand.

She was fifty years old; was there any hope at all she would ever learn to keep her mouth shut? She was mad at Jeanne for being touchy. Mad at herself for making a joke at the expense of the esteemed Dr. Theodore Tate—renowned horse’s ass. Every woman in town knew he was a lech; was it possible Jeanne didn’t? Somehow Hannah had never found the nerve to bring the subject up because since childhood Jeanne had been able to intimidate her. Hannah was also mad at the kids and mad at Dan. Mad at Liz too. She knew how Liz would look when she got off the plane, all strong and striding and confident. Almond-tanned. While every other woman in the English-speaking world fretted about overexposure to the sun’s rays, the genes of some long-ago Sephardic ancestor put lucky Liz at low risk for melanoma. This irritated Hannah and she didn’t care why because it just did. Thank heaven she didn’t have to explain it to anyone because she hadn’t a clue. She had always been moody but in the last couple of years she had begun to fear the sunrise, not knowing what darkness awaited her, what illogical anger or resentment. And then someone would tell her how good she looked, and she felt like a cheat. There she was, apparently a woman with her world in full bloom. Fifty and still mostly blonde, her skin good and barely lined, her body straight and slim and strong. A woman to be admired and envied. Right? Hah. God, she hated her moods. The way they stormed in and took over her life. Even as a kid, she could wake up feeling cheery as a red apple and in an hour, for no reason she could ever identify, everything went wormy with anger or dread.

After five years away, Liz had suddenly announced she was coming back to Rinconada for a visit. When Hannah asked her why, she waffled around, wouldn’t say anything specific. That vagueness was all it took to set Hannah’s imagination going. Liz had cancer, Hannah was sure of it.

“Why are you coming?” Hannah couldn’t help asking when Liz called her from Florida to talk about the rain. Liz had laughed.

“Because I love you. And I miss you.”

And I have cancer and I’m going to die and I don’t want to tell you in a letter. On the phone the word was right there, cancer, waving on the line like a pair of blood-red panties.

Hannah walked to the window and stared down the garden to the pool and below it to the barn and paddock and the line of trees that marked the slope leading to the creek. The view further depressed her: autumn flowers sparse and stunted, a film of dust on every leaf and blade of grass. More than three years without a season of generous rain had stressed even the stoic eucalyptus. Against the sky, they drooped in bedraggled silhouettes like a line of dirty mops.

“Please, God, make Liz okay and let her bring the rain with her.” Hannah rested her forehead against the window glass. Like the parched earth she felt abandoned, uncared for and depleted.

Reflexively, her mother’s critical voice played in her head. You have so much, Hannah. It’s a sin to want more when others have nothing.

Her father had taught her to make an alphabetical gratitude list. He said it was what he did. Even a priest in the Episcopal Church has his down days, Hannah. The thing is, not to give in.

First up: A.

Angel.

I am grateful for Angel because she smiles at me and holds out her arms to me, because there are things I can do for her that no one else can.

B.

Baby.

Angel. I’m grateful for the smell of her skin after I bathe her and for her heart I can hear when I press my ear to her chest.

C: child.

Angel. I am grateful for the soles of her feet and her long toes.

D: daughter.

Angel.

Jeanne Tate’s brain was like an old-fashioned oak desk fitted with niches, and drawers and cubbyholes. Moments before a parent conference it was fruitless to wonder about the mystery of Liz’s visit or let Hannah irritate her, so she squirreled her questions and feelings away and didn’t think about them after that. It was as if they didn’t exist at all.

Most of the parents Jeanne Tate interviewed were younger than Simon Weed; and she couldn’t always conceal her contempt for the yuppie moms and dads who appeared in her office wearing gold and smelling expensive. Yuppie. The word was dated now—or so Hannah told her every time she used it—but to Jeanne it best described the parents who parked their sleek cars in front of the school and then had to be told to move them to the parking lot behind the gymnasium as if they couldn’t read the sign that said NO PARKING, as if they were exempted. Hard bodied, glowing with affluent good health, cell phones ringing, palms stuck to miniature computers that told them where they were supposed to be and why: couldn’t they walk the little distance up the hill from the parking lot like everyone else?

Simon Weed might be older than most parents but Teddy had read aloud his credit report. He was another Silicon Valley millionaire, might even be a billionaire, Jeanne supposed. Such numbers became meaningless after a while.

Teddy had already begun to talk about pressing him for a contribution to the computer center Teddy was positive the school needed in order to stay competitive. That’s what Teddy did; he asked people for money and they gave it to him. The school was richly endowed because Teddy was a born fund-raiser and funds were everywhere in the Santa Clara valley. Happy Teddy, a boy in a world where every day was payday, where the skies rained dollars, not raindrops.

Weed might not be the easy touch Teddy thought he was. Jeanne saw that he had been cut from a different loaf than the rest of the zillionaires. For one thing, he had followed the signs directly to the lot, and Jeanne liked that. She also liked the paunchiness around his middle and the telltale line bisecting the lenses of his wire-rimmed glasses. Here, for once and all the way from Wisconsin, was an imperfect specimen, a real human being. She felt disposed to like his child as well.

“My company’s out here. Since I always seem to be working it makes sense to have Adam here too.”

Jeanne agreed and asked him a few more questions about his business—electronic somethings, she had only the vaguest idea what a transistor was, let alone a chip, or this little thing Simon Weed was explaining to her—but she knew how to nod intelligently. She was very good at that.

“Adam was born almost three months premature,” Weed said. “He’s got a little brain damage—enough so I’ve learned not to expect too much from him. He can get Cs, no question, but he has to work mighty hard. His last experience was pretty, well, pretty pitiful.” He looked guilty. “Public school.” Weed slapped his driving gloves across his palm as if he could punish himself.

“If a child works hard at Hilltop,” Jeanne said, “his grades will reflect that effort.” She heard the pedant in her voice and wished she could take the words back, start again. Speak the truth for once. We’ll take good care of him. He’ll be safe here. We’ll be kind. You won’t regret giving him to Hilltop.

What came out instead was, “Mr. Weed, I try to be sympathetic with public school educators. They don’t have an easy time of it, and sometimes children like Adam fall between the cracks.” She cringed at the cliché but kept going. “It’s sad how many children miss out in life for that very reason. But that doesn’t have to happen to Adam.”

“I don’t want him coddled.”

In Jeanne’s experience all parents wanted their children coddled, fussed over, and given special privileges; but she smiled at Simon Weed and pretended she believed him. “Here at Hilltop, Dr. Tate and I believe no good comes of hiding the truth from children, no matter how unpleasant or challenging that truth happens to be.” Weed looked agreeable to this so she went on. Words came easily, always. In graduate school when she was writing Teddy’s papers for him, she had to stop herself from writing too much.

She said, “In Adam’s case, he will have to acknowledge the fact of his brain damage for the rest of his life and age eight isn’t too young to start. We won’t make excuses for him but we also won’t punish him for what is certainly not his fault. We will teach him to make good use of the talents and abilities he has.”

“Mrs. Tate, I love my son. But he’s . . . sensitive. And losing his mother like he did last year, well, he’s pulled back from me. I can’t tell what he’s thinking anymore. And he spends too much time alone. He has a way of... disappearing, sometimes for hours at a time. What I’m trying to say is, he needs a lot of attention.” Simon Weed took off his glasses and rubbed the bridge of his nose. “He’s never been a gregarious child, but he was close to his mother. She taught him to ride. He wasn’t very good at it, but it gave him pleasure. Then he had to be the one to find her . . .”

“Perhaps you should tell me what happened.” Jeanne resisted a strong temptation to reach across the desk and touch his hand.

Simon Weed looked startled by her request and she thought for a moment that he would refuse. “He went down to saddle his mare.” He spoke so softly Jeanne could barely hear him. “She was right there in the barn, hanging from a crossbeam.”

Jeanne imagined a horse hanging from the barn roof and scolded herself for being perverse.

“Afterwards, I tried to get him to talk about it, but he clammed up. Sometimes I wonder if he’s forgotten it completely.”

Jeanne looked at the picture of Adam Weed on her computer screen. A boy with a pinched face and dull eyes separated by two deep vertical creases. She sensed the effort it took for him to look out at the world and not inward to his pain, to keep from imploding, from shrinking to a dot no larger than a period on a page. “Children forget in order to protect themselves. It’s actually very healthy.”

“But he’s got to remember sooner or later, doesn’t he? I don’t want him to grow up twisted, Mrs. Tate. When I die, he’ll be a rich man no matter how well he does in school. But I want him to have a life . . .”

“And there’s no reason he can’t have a good one. None at all.”

Simon Weed shifted in his chair. “How does a father know he’s doing the right thing? I told him we were coming here and he cried. He begged to stay with me.” He shifted again, his discomfort so intense Jeanne felt it come across the desk at her like a blast of heat. “I think he might need . . .” Weed struggled with the word, “psychiatric help.”

Jeanne didn’t approve of psychiatrists, particularly not for children, although she knew this was an old-fashioned attitude, one she had inherited from her father along with the rest of the Hilltop Method. She remembered him saying once that no child had problems so severe they couldn’t be cured with fairness and discipline. Over the years, a handful of troubled boys had tested Jeanne, but never enough to tempt her away from her father’s opinion.

“Give Adam a little time and he’ll find his place at Hilltop. He’ll be in the junior dorm, sharing a room with one other boy. His housemother is Mrs. White. Sooner or later, he’ll open his heart to her. All the boys confide their problems to Edith. I’m tempted to do it myself.” Jeanne laughed to dispel any suggestion that she might actually have problems. “We also have a brother system at Hilltop. Every boy in primary has a big brother assigned to him. This is someone he can go to when he needs help with his homework or if he thinks another boy’s bullying him or if he’s just lonesome for home. I’ve chosen Robby McFadden to be Adam’s big brother. This afternoon Robby will introduce your son around, give him a tour of the campus, find him a gym locker—”

“I’d feel better if you—”

“Tomorrow I’ll get acquainted with Adam myself. I promise.” Jeanne stood up and held out her hand. “Trust me, Mr. Weed, your son will do well at Hilltop. This is a very special place.”

He placed his chair back against the wall with an orderliness that delighted Jeanne’s heart.

“I’ll be flying between San Francisco and Tokyo from now until Christmas.” He handed Jeanne his business card. “You can always reach me at that number. If I’m not available, my secretary can find me. I’ll tell her to put through any calls from you right away.”

He stopped and pointed out the window at three boys lugging buckets across the front lawn for the school. “What are they doing?”

Jeanne walked around her desk and stood beside him. “We’ve been in a drought for the last three years, and we’ve learned to save water any way we can. Last year we issued a bucket for every shower stall and the boys fill them with the warm-up water. Rather than waste that water letting it run down the drain, the boys are assigned particular plants around the school to water. Thanks to them, the basic shrubbery and the rose cloister that was here when my parents bought the school have never looked better.”

She saw that Simon Weed approved of this.

“It’s another example of the Hilltop Method, Mr. Weed. Facing facts and making the best of reality whether it’s pleasant or not.”

Simon Weed looked at her with admiration.

Jeanne felt herself blush and became suddenly shy. “Credit my father and husband. Most of the good ideas come from them.”

“I was hoping I could meet Dr. Tate.”

“He’ll be sorry to have missed you.”

Simon Weed pointed to the framed diploma on the wall between the window and the office door. “You went to graduate school at Columbia, I see.”

“In the dark ages, yes.”

“My wife was there too.”

A frisson of anxiety tightened Jeanne’s back.

“Journalism.”

“It’s a wonderful department,” she said, moving toward the door.

“I knew your husband had a Ph.D. but I didn’t know you did. Was that mentioned in the brochure?”

“No,” Jeanne said. She put her hand on his shoulder, eased him out of the office. “A printer’s error. We didn’t catch it in time.”

In the hall Simon Weed said, “I’ll miss him.”

Jeanne saw that he meant it, and knew that despite his disadvantages, Adam Weed was a fortunate child. So many of the parents who brought their boys to Hilltop couldn’t wait to be rid of them and back to their own lives. Jeanne watched these parents as they left her office. She watched them through the window, climbing into their illegally parked BMWs and Land Rovers, speaking into cell phones, poking at their small computers.

“I’ll call you,” she said. “Try not to worry.”

She watched him walk away and returned to her office. She saw he had left his driving gloves on her desk. Absently, she slipped the gloves on and held her hands before her, turning them slowly palm to back to palm again. She held them to her face and inhaled the smell of leather and worn-in dirt and Simon Weed. She imagined they were still warm from his hands.

In the bottom drawer of her bedside table, Jeanne kept another pair of gloves wrapped in tissue paper and tied with a length of frayed pink hair ribbon. Those gloves were not expensive like Simon Weed’s, not hand stitched of supple leather, not meant for driving. They had a yellowed fleece lining and were intended to warm a young man’s hands on a frigid Berkeley afternoon when a wet wind from the northwest scoured the streets. Across the leather palms dark stains marked the leather leash of a yellow Lab, all muscle and high spirits and determined to drag the man—a graduate student—down the street to the patch of green the neighborhood called a park.

Jeanne had traced her son on-line and been surprised by how easy it was to run down the whereabouts of an adopted child. Perhaps if she had known how quickly and almost casually this could be accomplished with the help of the Internet, she would not have had the courage to try. But on a rainy afternoon, working late and finding it impossible to concentrate on the monthly report to the board, she had finally done what had occurred to her a hundred times before. Why had she called up her search engine and typed in adoption search on that particular day? Maybe she had been feeling lonely or nostalgic or regretful. Maybe Teddy had been more difficult than usual. She could not remember; it didn’t matter. She had done it, begun the process; and Jeanne rarely stopped something once she’d started it. The search for her son became her own exciting secret.

To find him so close, fifty miles to the north, practically a neighbor . . . She had not been sure what she felt then. Gladness, relief, a new dread to add to the others?

For a time it had been possible to put James, now called Mark, out of her mind. She had that kind of mind; it did as it was told. But she dreamed of him sometimes and there were boys at Hilltop whose names and faces tweaked her memory. According to the tracer’s report he had graduated from NYU and become a graduate student at UC. But what did he study? And what kind of personality did he have? Was he funny, impatient, thoughtful? The strong silent type or garrulous and talkative? Not married, the report said. But maybe in love? Gay or straight?

One afternoon she told Teddy she had an appointment in San Jose and left school early. She drove to Berkeley and parked outside the tiny bungalow where her son lived. She had no particular intention, and in this her behavior was so completely unlike her that if Hannah or Liz had heard about it they would have declared the story fiction. Logical Jeanne. Orderly Jeanne. Jeanne who would not tolerate loose ends or indecision parked her car in front of the house and turned off the ignition. She wrapped herself in her heavy wool coat and scrunched down behind the wheel like a private investigator in a film noir. She found the NPR affiliate station but turned it off after a few minutes. The talk intruded. If I am going to do something as peculiar and risky as this, she thought, I want to do it with full concentration.

After a while a man came out of the house leading a dog on a leash. He wore a navy blue parka and a black watch cap tugged down to cover his ears. Absolutely, this was her son. The glimpse she had of his handsome profile was like sighting Teddy at twenty. If someone had told her this was not her James she would have fought to prove it was.

She uttered a choking cry and began to weep.

The Lab tugged on the leash like a comic book dog, dragging its complaining, laughing master after him. The sound of the young man’s voice thrilled Jeanne. He turned into the park. She wiped her eyes, got out of the car and followed him. It was cold. Her damp face stung and her hands trembled. She shoved them deep in the pockets of her coat.

The park had a jungle gym, a soggy sandbox, a few benches and a picnic table with an overturned trash can beside it. James/Mark unhooked the Lab’s leash. The dog took off after the birds pecking at the trash can, got distracted and started digging in the trash himself.

“Rontu,” James/Mark called. “Get outa there.”

Rontu ignored him and grabbed a fried chicken box and shook it, scattering bones and papers around.

“Jesus Christ,” the young man yelled. “Goddamn son of a bitch. Sit, Rontu, goddamn sit!”

The dog looked up and dutifully sat, head hung low. James/Mark laughed and rubbed its ears, murmuring something. Jeanne couldn’t hear him; but she knew he was saying, “Good dog, good dog.”

James/Mark leashed the dog again, took a plastic bag from his pocket and removed his gloves, tossed them on the picnic table. With his hand in the plastic bag he picked up the mess Rontu had made. Neat, Jeanne thought. And responsible. My son. She thought her chest might burst with pleasure. She wanted to help him but the fear he would recognize her held her back. Was there a son and mother recognition gene? What would she say? How would she explain? If he knew the true story he would never forgive her.

James/Mark righted the trash can and turned away, walking toward the far side of the park. Jeanne thought it would look too obvious if she followed him. He would turn and look closely at her and then, the possibility of recognition. She watched his straight back and long strides all the way across the park. When he turned the corner out of sight, she sat down at the picnic table and held her face in her hands.

This was her son and Teddy’s. And she had been right to give him up. She could see immediately that his adopted parents had done a fine job of raising him. Look how wonderfully well he had turned out: an intelligent and responsible man with a sense of humor.

Better than we could have done.

Beside her elbow, his gloves. She picked them up and looked across the park where she had hoped to see him return. If he did she would say: You left your gloves. And he would grin and say, Yeah, thanks. No, he might see the similarity in their eyes or high cheekbones. Worse, he could recall her voice from his infancy. She had sung him a lullaby her grandmother taught her: Stay little wave, stay little wave, Shy one stay on the shore.

She slipped her hands inside the gloves and walked back to the car wearing them and crossed the street to lay them on the bungalow’s square porch where he would find them. But at the edge of the ragged lawn she stopped, turned back to the car and drove home.

It wasn’t stealing. James/Mark was her son, her blood. And Jeanne had always appropriated items belonging to the people she cared about. Cuff links from her father’s dresser. A neatly folded, embroidered handkerchief from her mother’s purse. Not to use, to hoard and hide. When Hannah’s daughter, Ingrid, was born Jeanne took a little ribbon headband, pink and pale yellow, the quintessence of femininity for a bald-headed baby girl. A frivolous thing. But it had relieved the anger and envy Jeanne felt whenever she thought of Hannah and her newborn.

Now she touched her cheek with Simon Weed’s gloves. The leather was soft as baby skin. She felt no envy for Simon Weed. Nothing about him made her angry, nor did she want power over him. Jeanne didn’t know why she wanted his gloves but it was not in her character to dissect and microanalyze motives. She wanted them. She would put them in her desk where she could sometimes take them out and slip them on. If he came back for them they would be there, but he was a rich man. A pair of worn gloves meant nothing to him.

Jeanne went into the office adjoining hers and told the school secretary, Ann Vickery, that she was going home before taking her lunch with the boys in the dining hall.

“Simon Weed forgot his gloves,” she said. “They’re in my top drawer if he calls.”

Teddy refused to eat the school food but the presence of one or the other of them was expected in the dining room. Today was Thursday; she was scheduled to sit with the eight-year-olds and watch them drip ketchup down their chins. She left the administration building by a side door.

Though larger now, with a new gymnasium and outdoor amphitheater, Hilltop School was not much changed from the days when Jeanne and Liz and Hannah—nine or ten at the time—hid in the bushes outside the dorms and spied on the boys undressing. Or when, a few years later, they shared a crush on a senior-school boy whose father was a famous movie star. Jeanne’s parents, Wade and Vera Hendrickson, had bought the land and buildings during the war from a departing religious order for—as Jeanne’s father always said with smirky cleverness—a hymn. The old buildings were of stone and stucco with heavy tile roofs; and though Hilltop was decidedly nondenominational, an atmosphere of latent Romanism clung to the place in the form of religious arcana cut in the arches and windows and doors of the older buildings. Here and there along the paths that unified the forty-acre grounds, stone slabs had been sunk between the flagstones and etched with pious Latin phrases. What had once been a chapel was now called simply the Meeting House, but the stained glass windows and carved Stations of the Cross contradicted the plain Yankee name.

Jeanne remembered Hilltop’s lean years when her parents taught every subject themselves and borrowed money to keep the school open. Nowadays Jeanne turned away dozens of prospective students for lack of space. According to the Hilltop Method, small classes were essential to good schooling—as were facing facts, standards of responsibility, and teaching boys to start at the beginning and move forward logically, step by step, sticking to the task until completed. A strong work ethic, Wade Hendrickson had often said, was more important than a college education.

It wasn’t a sophisticated pedagogical theory; in the Sixties and Seventies it had been derided as backward and stifling. But with the back-to-basics movement, Hilltop had actually become trendy. It didn’t hurt that Hilltop had the test scores and bank balance to prove its method worked.

Jeanne crossed the yellowed lawn to the flagstone path that entered the walled rose garden and divided the one hundred plants into concentric circles, a kind of simple labyrinth where once, Jeanne supposed, the nuns in their floating robes had strolled, whispering their rosaries. They had left behind, trapped within the walls, a meditative calm. In the midst of the garden crouched a lion-footed stone bench. She stopped beside it a moment and inhaled the fragrance of the blooms. Ragged Robin, Eglantine, Damask Rose, Etoile d’Hollande: she loved the old-fashioned names and blowsy cabbage blossoms that reminded her of buxom old ladies in silk. The roses in the cloister bloomed while the grass outside the wall yellowed and died.

In a photo taken when she was six or seven, still in pigtails, of course, and a dress with puffed sleeves—didn’t all little-girl dresses have puffed sleeves in those days?—her brother Michael stands at her side, his hand on her shoulder. He is so much taller than she, her head only reaches the middle of his chest.

Jeanne clearly remembered the occasion of the photo. Seconds before her father snapped it, she had been whining because her organdy dress scratched her arms and neck. The old black-and-white photo still shows, just above Jeanne’s smile, the slight shadow on one cheek where her mother slapped her.

Teddy and Jeanne’s home lay beyond the rose garden and through a hedge of pink oleander bushes that loved the drought. The single story frame-and-stucco house had been designed in what used to be called California ranch style. Judging from the French chateaux and Elizabethan fortresses now being built in the hills around Rinconada, the California ranch style was currently out of favor. But Jeanne loved the house and could walk through it blindfolded, for apart from college and the years when she and Teddy were in Manhattan, this house with its deep-silled, shuttered windows and cool rooms was the only one she had ever lived in. She walked toward the sound of a television blaring.

On the bed, Teddy Tate silenced the TV with the remote.

“If your head hurts, you shouldn’t watch the set. It’s a strain on your eyes.” Jeanne went into the bathroom and came out brushing her shoulder length brown hair. “I think you should see a doctor. There’s medicine for a sinus condition.” She twisted her hair into a knot at the nape of her neck.

“You look like a schoolmarm,” Teddy said.

“That’s what I am.”

“Wear your contacts.”

“The air’s too dry.”

“You’re a good-looking woman, Jeanne. Why don’t you do something with yourself?”

Jeanne went back into the bathroom and wiped down the counter and basin.

Teddy called from the bedroom, “Have you seen my Waterman?”

“You shouldn’t be straining your eyes by writing.”

“That pen cost more than two hundred dollars.”

“Don’t lie flat. It’ll make the sinuses worse. You need extra pillows.”

“I haven’t seen it since last week.”

“Close your eyes.”

“You took the audiotapes.”

“I’m returning them to the library this afternoon when I take the littlies in the van.” She slipped a twisty around her hair and made a bun tight as a fist. “You could listen to music. Would you like me to find the classical station for you?”

Teddy mumbled that he would and closed his eyes.

Jeanne thought it was unfair of the Universe that men aged so handsomely. At fifty-two Teddy’s polished, preppy good looks had hardened, lost the sweetness that was there when he was young. Now he was just plain turn-around-and-gawk handsome. His strong chin and nose gave him the look of a man of character, someone to be relied upon in a pinch or a crisis. This no longer struck her as ironic.

She turned the radio dial. “I met Simon Weed this morning. He seems like a nice man. He told me his wife committed suicide. Hanged herself in the barn and the boy found her.”

“Another traumatized child.” Teddy groaned. “Lucky Hilltop School.”

“He noticed my diploma.”

“So? It’s on the wall.” The music was Wagner. “Turn it down, Jeanne. I can’t take Valhalla this morning.”

She looked at the telephone answering machine on the table next to the radio. She enjoyed talking on the phone, enjoyed being free to speak without being observed. But she resented the demands of the answering machine and would sometimes let twenty calls accumulate before pressing the play button. In her otherwise responsible personality, this was an aberration about which she could seem to do nothing. Did it signal something fundamentally unsound in her? A flaw she had been unable to eradicate?

Only one call today.

“Your sainted friend.” Teddy had never liked Hannah.

“What did she want?”

“I didn’t talk to her, Jeanne.”

“Did she leave a message?”

“I don’t know why we have an answering machine if you won’t use it.”

Jeanne touched the play button. The machine whirred and clicked and Hannah’s deep voice came over the line.

“Come over after school, okay?”

Jeanne pressed rewind.

Teddy thumbed the hollows on either side of the bridge of his nose. “I don’t think I’m going to make it to that building committee meeting, Jeanne. You’re going to have to do it.”

“Teddy, I haven’t seen Liz—”

“Go tonight.”

“It’s board Thursday.”

“The building committee won’t go past five.”

“I promised Edith White I’d listen to the problems the housekeeping staff’s having. Those old bathrooms in Senior House are going to have to be replaced. The maids are sick of the mess. The least we can do is listen to their complaints. You want to do that for me?”

“You’re the one who speaks Spanish.” Teddy sat forward and Jeanne slipped a second pillow behind his head. “Besides, if they don’t like the work, they can quit. It’s not like there’s a shortage of wetbacks.”

Jeanne looked at her husband a long moment.

“Sorry, old girl,” he said. “It’s this headache.”

She returned to the dressing room; and, despite the drought, ran the cold water a few seconds and splashed her face until it tingled. She patted it dry and applied a light sheen of lipstick to her wide mouth. She noted that the lines on either side, the parentheses, were deepening and so were those between her green eyes—eyes like peeled grapes, her brother used to tease. She must frown more than she realized. A little foundation might conceal them but lipstick was the only makeup she wore. When she was a teenager, she’d come home with five dollars’ worth of Tangee cosmetics, and her mother’s inebriated scolding still rang in her mind. A woman demeans her sex when she paints her face.

In the bedroom again she asked Teddy, “So what are your plans?”

“If I can get up later, I will. That’s about the best I can promise.”

Jeanne stood at the door. “I’ll bring you back some tapes from the library.”

“You’re a saint, Jeanne. What would I do without you?”

In the weeks following Billy Phillips’s funeral Liz had thought of Bluegang hundreds of times; in a way he was always in her mind in the same way she was always breathing whether she thought about it or not. She had told herself that what happened at Bluegang was an accident, a terrible misstep; and it wasn’t her fault, it was Hannah who pushed him and Jeanne who insisted they say nothing. But that was where her memory came unhinged and sometimes Liz felt like she had pushed Billy Phillips down onto the rocks herself.

Time’s passage rounded off the sharp angles of memory but it didn’t sink to the bottom of her consciousness, it never eroded. It was there like a stone in the shoe, a toothache, cramps, but she learned to ignore it. In time she became good at this—especially after she turned thirteen and got into trouble for smoking down by the old henhouse and kissing Eric Margolis behind the youth center. Her life crowded with new people and ideas and things she knew she should not do—but did anyway. Pretty soon she was kissing a lot of boys and her parents didn’t seem to notice so she kept on doing it. Making good grades: that was all that mattered to them. In history she and Jeanne and Hannah read about the Nonintercourse Act, collapsed in giggles, and got sent to detention.

But even when she wasn’t thinking of him, Billy Phillips was with Liz, and she was pretty sure it was the same for Hannah and Jeanne because sometimes in the middle of an ordinary moment—sitting on the swings at the park, drinking Cokes at the Burger Pit—Hannah’s expression suddenly turned grave and vacant. Her body stayed where it was and she kept on talking, but it was obvious that in her mind she was somewhere else and Liz knew where. It was the same with Jeanne, even tough-minded Jeanne.

The worst of it was, there was nowhere to hide from the memory of what they had done. Or not done. Liz just wasn’t sure about guilt and innocence anymore. Reading was no distraction, not even a really good novel like Marjorie Morningstar. And in the middle of a movie she would start to see things on the screen that she knew weren’t really there. A boy tumbling down a hill. A coyote snuffling around a body.

For a while she had been desperate to talk about it, but when she did, Hannah looked at her like she’d suddenly begun to speak Swahili.

Once Liz started up, “You know what happened at Bluegang? . . .” The three of them had been sitting on the edge of the fishpond in front of the high school wearing their roller skates. It was autumn and still warm. They wore shorts and cotton blouses. “Do you guys ever think? . . .”

As if they were dancers set to move on cue, Hannah and Jeanne had stood up and skated away without glancing back at her. Liz could not forget the sight of their narrow backs and swinging shoulders moving farther and farther away, leaving her behind.

After that she kept her mouth shut and gradually she thought less about Bluegang and more about school and boys and clothes. A hundred memories a day became a dozen and then once or twice a week, and after that she went for long stretches without remembering. Occasionally she wondered if the process of forgetting was the same for her friends and supposed it must be, but she knew if she asked them they would skate away again. And what if they stayed away?

They were teenagers and life irresistibly happened all around them constantly, a dance they had to be half-dead not to join in. The arms of the world had opened up and swept them into lives where everything was a challenge or an adventure or a puzzle. Once in a while Liz saw old Mrs. Phillips and Bluegang came back to her. At such times she thought less of Billy’s death than she did of her failure to do the right thing. When her parents asked Can we depend on you, Liz? she always said they could but knew it was a lie.

High school was a ball: high grades and student body offices, kissing Mario Bacci, smoking Marlboros in the upstairs girls’ bathroom, breaking rules when they could and just for the fun of it. They went to college—seventy-eight percent of the Rinconada graduating class did. Hannah married a doctor and bought a house on Casabella Road and raised two children. Jeanne married her college sweetheart and made a national reputation as an educator. And Liz grew up and led a disjointed peripatetic life and kept on breaking rules in small ways. She became a successful translator of modestly successful books and lived in France, as she had always wanted. She never spoke of Bluegang to anyone until the night, decades afterwards, when she woke, crying, because a coyote had Billy Phillips’s icy hand in its mouth and then it was her ankle it held and she couldn’t break away or cry for help because she couldn’t breathe.

As the flight from Miami taxied into place at San Jose Airport, Liz rewound the tape she had been listening to—Gregorian chants, soothing as tranquilizers. She slipped the Walkman into her oversized canvas tote, stood and inched her way down the aisle toward the exit.

She felt her airport demeanor take possession: a longer stride and straighter back, prouder head, expression not excited, never excited, but anticipatory, expectant, busy-busy-busy. She knew the other passengers and the people lined up at the airport windows watched her as she strode across the tarmac between the plane and the terminal. Gerard said they watched because she looked like Someone. A woman just back from someplace thrilling, en route to somewhere even better. Though no longer young and never beautiful—her nose was long, a little hooked, and her forehead too high—she attracted more attention now than ever. Gerard said she carried herself with distinction—which was also pretty amusing since she had never felt in the least distinctive. If she had, she would not have had to create her airport personality in the first place.

Once in Heathrow Airport a teenaged girl had asked for her autograph. She signed Amelia Earhart and the girl had said, “I just love your show.”

Hannah waited behind the barrier. Her round youthful face beamed at Liz through the glass, glowing with health and excitement. She wore a long cotton skirt and a roomy Shaker sweater the color of orange sherbet and her feet were laced into leather espadrilles. A thick braid overpowered her willful silver blond hair and hung to the middle of her back. Exotic bead and turquoise earrings dangled halfway to her shoulders. She looked like a rich grown-up hippie.

They waved, ran and fell into each other’s arms. Let’s not talk, Liz thought. Let’s not spoil this.

In the car there was suddenly too much to say and no easy place to start so Liz filled up the space with talk about the guest house in Belize, her friends, the way she and Gerard lived.

“While I’m gone he’s starting the new kitchen and that’ll make life much easier. Trying to feed a dozen hungry tourists breakfast and dinner on a gas stove with two burners is a nightmare. When I get back there’ll be a new Aga stove—new to us, anyway; actually we’re buying it from a pair of old British queens; one of them’s sick so they’ve decided to go back to England. And while I was in Miami I ordered a double refrigerator with a huge freezer. Plus a bunch of modular cupboards and some Formica. Bright red, can you believe that? Remember when the stuff only came in speckled and sand? God willing it all gets on the right ship and someone finds the energy to unload it.” She paused for breath. “You and Dan’ll have to quit making excuses and come down before we get too fashionable. Gerard can take you into the rain forest and there’s Mayan ruins.” She must have said all this before on the phone or e-mail. The important thing was to avoid empty air. “It’s super down there, Hannah. In the morning everything drips and the sound of the place is primeval.”

“And Gerard? He’s well?”

Liz took a photo from her purse and held it out. “I don’t think you’ve seen this one.” It showed a tall, dark man, with heavy eyes, strong and vigorous in his sixties, dressed in bush shirt and shorts.

“A hero for the new age,” Hannah said. “The Great White Environmentalist.” She grinned. “Cool.”

Hannah jerked the Volvo into the fast lane and Liz pressed her feet into the floorboards as if the car had dual controls like the one they’d all learned to drive on in Driver Education. Hannah had always been a kind of crazy driver given to last minute turns and tailgating. Liz felt the sonar beep of a headache behind her ears.

In the Santa Clara valley, five years’ absence meant a century of change. Going way back she remembered a time when orchards, not silicon, supported the valley. A time when the fruity summer air sang with susurration of bees and yellow jackets and everyone got stung and bit and knew to jump into an irrigation ditch if a swarm attacked. Today there were freeways where she remembered tacky apartments, malls like castle complexes, and cars, thousands of cars. It was worse than Miami. Overhead the sky was yellow.

Smaze, Hannah called it. “The drought just makes it worse.” The interior of the Volvo was hot and close and Liz rolled the window down a little. The noise of engines and tires on asphalt was unpleasant.

“I can’t hear you over the racket.”

“What about air conditioning?”

“I am permanently and politically opposed to it,” Hannah said and grinned. “If you have time, I want you to visit Resurrection House with me. There’s one little baby, her name is Angel . . .”

“You haven’t changed, Hannah. Always a cause. Always the life saver. Vietnam protests, abused animals—”

“I have changed,” Hannah snapped. “Don’t patronize me because I haven’t had your big exciting life. What I do at Resurrection House is very important.”

Shit.

Coming home was like swimming in a strange sea. Below the surface there were thickets of tangled seaweed. “But you’ve got to admit there was a time—” Liz giggled and covered her mouth with her hand. “Remember when you decided it was cruel of Mr. Silva to keep his Japanese quail in that little cage?”

“He was such a prick. He wanted to send me to Juvie.”

They were eleven and in school they read about the cannibalism of overcrowded, stressed-out rats.

“I couldn’t stop thinking of those pretty birds all pecking each other to death.” Hannah laughed. “How was I to know they were worth two hundred bucks each. They just looked like birds to me.”

She turned off the freeway at Lark Avenue. The exit ran through a new housing development built in an old prune orchard. The homes were two- and three-story affairs with triple garages and massive brick and stone facades crowded onto lots suited to buildings half their size.

“So much tack, so little time,” Liz said.

Hannah braked and idled in a line of cars waiting for a landscape truck to unload a twenty-foot liquid ambar. “Gail Bacci says they’re going for more than a million each.”

Someone in the line of cars banged on his horn.

“Jerk,” Hannah said.

“Who buys them?”

“I don’t know. Computer people, I guess. They’re like an invading species. We never mix. We’re the old-timers. The newcomers think we’re frumpy. All they want to do is buy our houses, tear them down and build more of those things.” The line of cars moved forward. “You’re looking at the new Rinconada. Kids in Ingrid’s class drive Lexus SUVs.”

“Are they nice kids?”

“Jesus, who knows. The school’s got more castes than India. And it’s huge. Not like it was for us, the way we knew everyone.”

“My parents would have hated it.”

Hannah looked at Liz and shook her head. “Your parents wouldn’t have noticed.”

A stinging wind blew through Liz’s mind, plucking the strings of her headache.

When she was seven, she spent the night at Hannah’s house for the first time. On the twin beds in Hannah’s bedroom with its dormer windows and walk-in closet, the blue satin coverlets had been turned down and the pillows plumped. Liz saw Hannah’s sprigged flannel nightie laid across the blankets like a patch of garden and compared it to her own pj’s, buttoned up with safety pins. From the distance of several decades the disregard of her distracted intellectual parents still had power to tear her heart. It shouldn’t matter anymore, she told herself, but it did.

“It’s all so clear in my mind, like it was yesterday . . .” Say it. “Remember Bluegang?”

Hannah shuddered. “It’s changed too, big time. If I didn’t love my house and if the wildwood weren’t there like a barrier, I’d move across town. Gail says there are homeless people living in those caves up beyond the swimming hole. There’s trash all around and sewage too, I suppose. You’d probably die if you drank the water.”

Talk, talk, talk. Saying nothing, nothing, nothing.

Remember Bluegang?

“Gail’s always after me to join the group she’s organized to clean it up, but I just don’t have the time. You know? I give her a big check every year but there’s only so much a person can do.” Hannah braked and turned into a parking lot.

Liz read the sign painted on the building in front of them: Bacci’s Italian Market. In cement planters between parking places, purple and gold lantana drooped under the midday sun. The fragrance of salami, briny olives and baking bread came through the car window.

Hannah switched off the ignition and reached into the backseat for her straw purse. “You want to come in? It’d tickle Mario to see you. He and Gail are coming to dinner Saturday if you’d rather not.”

“I’ll stay.”

Liz put her head back and closed her eyes. Fatigue and apprehension lay on her eyelids like iron coins.

“Were you asleep?” Hannah asked as she opened the door fifteen minutes later. “Do you feel okay?”

“I’m fine.” Liz poked in the brown paper bags. “What did you buy me?”

“Salami. Biscotti with walnuts and anise dipped in chocolate. Mindy Ryder makes it.”

“What’s she doing with herself?”

“That’s probably not a good question to ask.” They laughed. “She’s coming on Saturday too so you can ask her yourself.” Hannah pulled out onto Rinconada’s main street lined with specialty shops and boutiques with clever names: Bearly Yours, Heavenly Heels.

Liz said, “I was in love with him once. Mario.”

“When’s the last time you saw him?”

“Fifteenth reunion, I think. It was before I met Gerard.”

“Well, let me prepare you. The Italian stallion has eaten a bit too much of his own spaghetti.” The car in front stopped suddenly. “Shit.”

Liz double-checked her seat belt.

“Gail’s made a fortune selling real estate to half of Silicon Valley and they all drive down Santa Cruz Avenue cruising the shops. Jeanne says when Judgment Day comes, Gail’s going to burn in hell for what she’s done to this town.”

“How is Jeanne anyway? Her letters don’t give much away.”

Hannah drummed her fingers on the steering wheel as they waited for traffic to clear. “She’d say the same of yours.”

“Lord, Hannah, I’m an open book.”

Hannah’s gaze snapped. “Don’t forget who you’re talking to, Lizzie. I’m the girl who knew you when.”

And I you.

Liz asked, “How’s the abominable spouse?”

“Still abominable.” At a stoplight Hannah signaled right and turned up Casabella Road.

By contrast to Santa Cruz Avenue, Casabella Road had changed little in the years since Liz and her two friends walked it to and from school every day. It began at the Corner Drug Store and, staying level for a while, curved around the little town cemetery before it turned again and ran parallel to Santa Cruz Avenue for several blocks. Beyond St. Margaret’s Episcopal Church where Hannah’s father was rector for more than twenty years, it veered left and up the long grade old-timers in town still called Queen Victoria’s Hill. On either side, restored Victorian homes faced each other like a dowager standoff.

“Stop a second,” Liz said. “Pull over.”

It had been her intention to fix her gaze directly ahead when the car reached the corner of Casabella and Manzanita. But the wind was blowing hard again, stirring up the grit of memory. The two-storied Victorian stood in the middle of its half-acre lot and called her name.

Hannah said, “It belongs to some people from Rhode Island now. Big computer bucks.” The verge board, the bracketed eaves, and the arch of rosettes crowning every window: all had been scrupulously restored and, like the rest of the house, sparkled achingly white in the sunlight. On the porch there was a swing with a bright blue canvas awning.

“If you want to see inside I can call the owner. Her name’s Mitzi Sandler. I know her from the Spring Festival Committee. Most of the invaders are two income families, too busy to get into town affairs. She’s different. We don’t really know each other but she seems okay, better than most maybe.”

“I wonder what it was that made my parents buy such a big house in the first place,” Liz said. “They never intended to have a family. If they told me once I was an accident, they told me a hundred times. I’m so used to thinking of them as totally a-parental, but this house . . . I mean it’s such a . . . grandmotherly house. You know what I mean, Hannah? Maybe there was a time when . . .”

Or maybe the big house made it easier to pretend she wasn’t there.

Beyond Manzanita and Greenwood and Oak Streets, Casabella Road leveled out again and followed the shoulder of the hill for a quarter mile then dropped abruptly into a shadowy canyon and a hairpin curve across a bridge over Bluegang Creek. When it rose again, Liz saw a sign, a discreet bronze rectangle: HILLTOP SCHOOL, ONE QUARTER MILE.

Hannah said, “Low keyed and very high priced these days.”

At the end of a long driveway Hannah and Dan Tarwater’s white country farmhouse sprawled in the shade of half a dozen California live oaks. Hannah stopped at the mailbox and leaned out the car window to open it. She riffled through the bundle of envelopes, advertising flyers, and catalogs. She held a large overnight mail envelope, reading the return address. “This is for you,” she said and handed it to Liz, eyebrows raised. “It’s from a doctor. In Miami.”