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A curl of something alien, a faint, unborn rebelliousness, moved inside Mike, underneath the shock and pain. “I’m not going to hurt him, Bay,” she said crisply. “But I’m not stringing him along. I’ve changed my mind, I guess. I really do think he’s right. The state should not take a man’s property against his will. You know that’s wrong as well as I do. And it’s just as wrong not to try to fight it. Even if you lose. If he gets
too agitated, I’ll try to get him to slack off. But I’m going to help him try.”

There was another silence. Then he said, in the same tight, frozen voice, “I take it you know what the plan of action is, then.”

“As a matter of fact, I don’t,” Mike retorted, close to tears. She wasn’t going to tell this cold-voiced stranger what Sam Canaday had told her. Not yet, anyway. He could damn well wait. She might tell him when she chose, and then again, she might not. What possible difference could it make in the outcome of the decision, anyway?

“Well, I want you to find out right away. And I want you to call me at the Ritz Carlton when you do. Maybe I can undo some of the damage you’re doing, if I know what’s going on. Mike, if you go on with this, you are doing it without my sanction. With my extreme disapproval, in fact.”

“How very unfortunate,” Mike said, around a lump of agony and coldness in her throat that threatened to choke off her breath.

He hung up.

By dinnertime she was prowling and miserable, and could not eat the excellent fresh vegetable soup and cornbread that Lavinia had left. She felt a terrible black, lightless weight, a sadness as deep as if certain catastrophe or death waited ahead for someone she loved very much. Nothing in the entire world seemed to fit in its pattern or orbit. This is how I should be feeling about Daddy, she thought. Bad luck for both of us that I don’t. She remembered the summer of her fifteenth year, when she had discovered the poetry of Dorothy Parker and had memorized great chunks of the brittle, brilliant doggerel. “The sun’s gone dim and the moon’s turned black / For I loved him and he didn’t love back.” She had especially loved that one, and had yearned to be the kind of sophisticated, mocking, life-used woman
who could say those words out of experience. What a fool I was, Mike thought. They aren’t funny. She wasn’t a funny woman. She meant that, and this is how it feels.

Her father seemed to catch her thoughts and lifted his head from his soup like a starved old hound.

“Bay not coming tonight?” he asked querulously. “Hasn’t been here in quite a spell, has he?”

“He called while you were asleep. He’s had to go to Boston to see about a clinic for Sally. I … he says she’s sick again.”

Her father’s eyes lost their avian glitter and his voice was gentler. “Poor Miss Sally,” he said. “She hasn’t had much luck. Hasn’t had much luck. Sometimes I think I should’ve stayed out of it. Might have had an altogether different life.”

“Well, it’s been my experience that an alcoholic is going to drink wherever he or she winds up,” Mike said, for some reason stung by his solicitude for Sally Sewell. Then she remembered that Bay had said her father did not know about Sally’s drinking, and her hand flew involuntarily to her mouth.

“You think I didn’t know she was a drinker?” he said, looking at her out of the corner of one filmed raven’s eye. “Knew before anybody else around her, practically. Not much I don’t know, Micah. I know why she does it, too.”

“Well,” Mike said again. “It was awfully sad about the little boy, but it’s been … what? twelve years? … and you’d think she might start pulling herself together. You don’t see Bay soaked in gin because his son drowned.”

“No. That’s one thing you’d never see,” her father said. “Got too much at stake, he has. Got too much going for him. But Miss Sally … not got much at all, seems to me.”

“Oh, Pa, don’t be so damned sentimental,” Mike snapped in exasperation. “She’s got a beautiful home,
and two terrific sons, and a wonderful husband. Bay couldn’t do any more for her than he has.”

“You can say that again,” her father said. Soon he lapsed into a nodding doze in his chair in front of the television set, and Mike cleared the dishes and started the dishwasher. By the time she had wiped off the counters and hung up the cloth, it was only eight o’clock and still bright outside. The evening chorus of birds had not yet begun to chirp down toward sleep. Mike roamed from room to room, straightening an ashtray here and wiping off a film of dust there with the tail of her shirt. Her misery roamed with her, and howled and sang in her ears. If he would only call, if he would just call … she would apologize for being willful and childish. She would tell him that she would stop her part in the letter-writing project. She would beg him not to be angry with her. She knew she could make it right. She could find the words. If he would just call.

The phone rang and she caught it up in the front hall before it could ring again. “Hello?” she said. Her breath was so faint that she could hardly get the words out.

“Hi, it’s me,” Rachel said from California.

Disappointment so profound that it buckled her knees flooded Mike, and she sat down on the edge of the old Jacobean table that had dominated the hall since she could remember. And then the thought registered: This is Rachel. My daughter. My first and best love. To whom I have not talked since that awful day at LaGuardia, six weeks ago.

“Hi, darling.” She forced gladness into her voice. She heard her voice in her own ears, taking on the slightly forced and affected tone she had always used when talking to other children. But never to Rachel. Rachel was not children. Rachel was her daughter. Daughter? Mike Winship had not been, for many days now, a woman to whom children were a reality.

“How wonderful to hear from you,” she said.

“You, too. Hope things there are great. Is … everybody okay? You know, your father …”

“He’s doing very well,” Mike said. Why should Rachel call him “grandfather”? She herself had choked on “father” until just recently. “How are things with you?”

“Oh, just
wonderful,”
Rachel caroled across two thousand humming miles. Her voice sounded different, older, harder, brighter. “I’ve just come in from a late lunch at Spago … you know, Wolfgang Puck’s place … and we saw Warren Beatty and actually talked to Emilio Estevez … he said I was a fox; said he’d be glad to hang around a year or two until I grew up … and we had lunch with this man; he’s an independent producer and he’s reading a script by a client of Daddy’s and we think he’s going to take it and do the film in Puerto Vallarta, and actually, that’s why I called …”

Rachel’s voice lilted on, the voice and words of a changeling without innocence, a spoiled and chiming Venus. Mike listened in simple amazement. Who was this knowing little piece who called herself Rachel Singer?

“… so Dad said I could if I asked you first, and you’ve just got to let me, or I’ll die. I’ll kill myself.”

“Let you do what?” Mike said stupidly. “I’m sorry, Rachel, I’m not tracking very well tonight. Slow down a little.”

“Oh,
God
, Mother, don’t be obtuse! Let me go with them to Puerto Vallarta and do a part in the movie. It’s just a little part; just a teensy cameo, but it’s a starmaker, Paul says … that’s the producer. A kind of now Lolita, very young, very sensuous. He wants the contrast of the innocence in all the depravity and excess of the rich, jaded resort crowd.” Rachel might have been reading aloud from a bad paperback. “He says I
have just the right quality, a kind of mocking prepubescent angel. There wouldn’t be any sex or violence in my sequence, and no real nudity …”

“Absolutely not,” Mike said, her blood seeming to thicken and run cold.

“Oh,
God
, I told him and Daddy you’d be stupid about it,” her daughter shrilled. “I told them you wouldn’t have the slightest inkling on
earth
what it meant to me, and what they were trying to accomplish with the film …”

“Rachel, I am not going to give you my blessing to go traipsing off to Mexico with some cokehead artyfarty producer and make a soft-porn movie, not at age twelve and not at any age. You must be out of your mind, and your father must be simply and irrevocably insane. Put it right out of your mind, and put him on, please.”

“He isn’t here. He’s out … with Lacey Schiller. The one who just finished
Lush Life
and is probably the hottest property in the country right now. He’s been sleeping with her for months, and he’ll probably marry her. And then she’ll be my mother, because if you don’t say I can go I’m going to stay out here forever, and I’ll never come home, and you can bet your ass she’ll let me make films if I want to. She’d never stand in the way of an opportunity like this.”

“Rachel, listen. Listen to me. I’m not going to forbid you to do this idiotic, awful, tasteless, sleazy thing, because I’ve always let you make your own decisions, and you know that. But I want you to remember who you are and what a wonderful potential you have; remember all the advantages you’ve been given. Do you want to just throw all that away?” Mike felt as if she were in a movie herself, one in which the speed and sound had been slowed down.

“Oh, God, that’s really good,” spat Rachel. “That’s just really too super-wonderful for words. What potential?
What advantages? A stupid roach house in Greenwich Village and a mother who can’t even keep a job or a man or a roof over our heads? Who isn’t ever, ever,
ever
home, even? Some potential. Some advantages. And you’re right, you’re not going to forbid me to do it, because I’m going to do it anyway. And the bloody
hell
with you!”

Rachel slammed down the telephone, but not before Mike could tell that she was crying hard. Where was Richard? Had he even the faintest notion of what he was doing to his daughter? Was he past caring? Was there anyone there who could put strong, sure arms around Rachel and comfort her? Like Mike herself, Rachel almost never wept, and when she did, the loss of control upset and frightened her badly and for a long time. Those were the only times that she permitted Mike to hold her and rock her and croon to her. She could still feel the wildly trembling little shoulders, and the frail bird’s bones. Mike felt, instead of pain and anger, an abrupt onset of the great white emptiness and fatigue that had nearly drowned her on her first evening in this house. She put her head down on her arms and closed her eyes.

Sam Canaday, coming into the hall from the front porch with a fresh stack of stationery and new tapes for the recorder, found her there. She did not know how long he had stood looking at her in the failing twilight of the hall, for she had not heard his step on the porch.

“Want to talk about it?” he said, switching on the old brass library lamp on the table and settling himself on its other end.

Oddly, she did, and she repeated the conversation word for word, in a voice that held neither pain nor grief nor anger nor even regret. Mike might have been reading him a shopping list. He listened without changing his expression, and when she was finished, he was
silent for a long moment, and then he said, “And so what are you going to do?”

“What can I do?” Mike said faintly. “She says she’ll never come home if I try to stop her. He could get her for good, Sam. I’ve always known that he could. He just never wanted to. I don’t think she really interested him before. Now apparently she does, since she’s fitting so neatly into his world. He’s got all the money and all the contacts and all the big guns, and she can legally decide who she wants to live with when she’s fourteen, anyway. What options do I have? I’m not her jailer. I’ve always wanted her to be her own person.”

“Good Christ, in Puerto Vallarta with a cocaine dealer in a skin flick? She’s twelve years old! You really want her to be next’s year’s Princess Stephanie?”

“Of course not …”

“Then go get her! Scream at her, smack her, kidnap her, if you have to!” The intensity of his febrile green eyes in the lamplight was almost frightening. The light threw slanted shadows over his sharp face and under his cheekbones, so that he looked wild and Mongol, lit from beneath. She said nothing.

“You know, Mike,” he went on presently in a more even voice, “I’ve been waiting to see the whole woman in you, but you’ve never let me, and I’m beginning to think there isn’t one. Why aren’t you so angry you could walk to L.A. and carry her home on your shoulders? I’ve seen your admirable forbearance, and God knows I’ve seen your fabled journalistic detachment, and I’ve seen you so jazzed up with terror you were about to jump out of your skin, when you first came. And I’ve seen you softer, lately, a kind of amiable sleepwalker, which is admittedly an improvement. But I’ve never seen you really laugh, or get blazing mad, and I’ve never seen you grieve, and I’ve never, never seen you start to cry. What are you, lady? And as for loving …”

“Oh, what the hell do you know about loving?” Mike said tiredly. “Do you think I don’t love my own daughter; do you think I don’t love … if you’re such an expert on loving, where’s
your
family? Where’s your wife and your children, or your woman? Who do
you
love, Sam? Let me be. Get off my case. You’ve been preaching at me ever since I set foot in this house. I don’t want to hear any more of it. I’m so tired I think I could die right here.”

Sam Canaday was silent, and then he raised his shoulders high and dropped them, and rubbed the back of his neck.

“You’re right,” he said. “About all of it. I have been on your case, and I’ll get off it as of right now. A pot as black as I am has no right calling the kettle anything at all. Listen. I’ve got to go take a deposition in Atlanta tomorrow afternoon. Why don’t you come with me and we’ll get some dinner and have a few drinks and hoot and holler a little, or whatever else you’d like to do. J.W. can come sit with the Colonel. He used to do it all the time. You need to get out of this house.”

In her mind’s eye, Mike saw a dim, anonymous, cool restaurant, saw the little shaded lamps rose-lit and the waiter handing the wine bottle to him to inspect, smelled good food and wine and the night smells of the summer city, felt chill, urban air on her cheek and the silky sheen of stockings on her legs and the slim embrace of narrow high-heeled shoes on her feet. Her fingers seemed to touch heavy silverware and cold crystal.