The Best American Short Stories 2013

SUZANNE RIVECCA Philanthropy

DAYS BEFORE SHE MET the novelist, Cora went to the library and brought home a stack of plastic-sleeved hardcovers with one-word titles like Heirloom and Ruffian and Seductress. Her favorite was an early effort with an unusually loquacious title: The Illegitimate Prince’s Child. At first it was unclear who was illegitimate, the prince or his child. It turned out to be both. During the Hep C Support Group at the drop-in, Cora read aloud sentences like “Evelina knew Rolf would never marry her if she revealed her true station, but having been a bastard himself, how could he inflict the same fate on the unborn child inside her?” She regaled the needle-exchange staff with passages from Ruffian, substituting clients’ names for the well-endowed hero’s. She knew she was being inappropriate but she couldn’t stop. She studied Yvonne Borneo’s soft-focus author photos and imagined the hilarious incongruity of her vaunted good works—scattering gold pieces to hookers as she was borne down Mission Street on a litter, that sort of thing—and now that the appointed time had arrived for them to meet, she wanted Yvonne Borneo to deliver. She wanted a white mink hat and coat, a thick tread of diamonds across the collarbones, peacock-blue eyeshadow and sharp swipes of blush and impossibly glossy lips: the rigidly contoured, calculatedly baroque opulence of an eighties soap star auditioning for the role of tsarina. And Yvonne Borneo disappointed her by showing up at Capp Street Women’s Services in a plain taupe skirt and suit jacket. Her sole concession to decadence was a mulberry cashmere scarf, soft as a runaway’s peach fuzz, held in place with a metal pin shaped like a Scottie dog’s silhouette.

“Well, you’re just a tiny little mite” was the first thing she said to Cora. Her voice was butterfat-rich but filmy, like an old bar of dark chocolate that had taken on a gray cast.

The novelist/philanthropist was more vigorous than her wax-figure photographs, and at the same time much frailer. She thrust her shoulders back with a martial bearing when she laughed, which was often, but Cora noticed her hands trembling slightly when they weren’t clasped in front of her. Her hair was beginning to thin. She was grandly imperious in a merrily half-ironic way. When Cora offered her a slice of red velvet cake, which she’d read was the novelist’s favorite, Yvonne said, “Bikini season’s upon us. I daren’t indulge!” Yet she didn’t flinch at the posted Rules of Conduct, scrolled in silver marker on black paper, hung above the TV in the main lounge, and frequently amended for circumstance. In the past few months, necessity had compelled Cora to add NO SHOWING GENITALIA, FLUSH THE TOILET AFTER YOU SHIT, and DON’T JERK OFF IN THE BATHROOM. This last rule was intended for the pre-op MTFs.

Yvonne read the rules from top to bottom, and when she was done she ruffled herself slightly, as though shaking off a light drizzle. Then she smiled brightly at Cora.

“Well,” she said. “Girls will be girls.”

Cora reminded herself that Yvonne Borneo was not easily shocked. How could she be? Her only child, a girl named Angelica, had stepped in front of a bullet train at twenty, after years of struggling with schizophrenia and—it was rumored—heroin addiction and sex work, although Yvonne had never confirmed this. She focused on the schizophrenia, referring to her late daughter as having “lost a battle with a significant and debilitating mental illness.” The foundation she established after Angelica’s death, the Angel Trust, gave money to provide mental health care for young women who had “lost their way” and were at risk of suicide.

Angelica had been the same age as Cora. As teenagers in the same Utah behavior modification program for troubled youth, they had known each other slightly. Cora was waiting for the right moment to tell Yvonne this. She tried to engineer an interval of quiet, seated intimacy, lowered voices, eye contact. But Yvonne moved too fast and talked too quickly, asking about city contracts and capital campaigns and annual reports, and Cora needed her money—the money from airport book sales and Hallmark Hall of Fame movie rights and the pocket change of millions of frustrated housewives—so badly she could hardly keep the desperation out of her voice. The city cuts had been devastating.

The Department of Public Health’s deputy director, who had set up this meeting, warned her to cover her tattoos.

“Even the ones on my face?” Cora had said.

“I forgot about those. Okay, just don’t say anything about her daughter being a dope fiend.”

In Cora’s tiny office, Yvonne lingered a few moments before the Dead Wall, which featured photographs of kids who had overdosed or killed themselves or been stabbed. None of these photos were appropriately elegiac, since the bereaved families usually couldn’t be counted on to give Cora a cute school picture or a Polaroid of the deceased with a puppy. Most of the dead were memorialized in the act of flipping off the camera or smoking a bowl.

Yvonne put a hand to her chin. “It’s so sad,” she said. “Such a waste.”

“Yes,” Cora said.

“Well,” Yvonne said. She sat down, crossing her legs. “What do you envision the Angel Trust being able to do for you?”

She asked this without real curiosity, her tone silky, keen, and as expertly measured as a game-show host’s. Cora began to sweat.

“Well, first of all, I wouldn’t have to lay off any more outreach staff,” she said. Without realizing it, she was counting on her fingers. “And there are basic expenses like rent and utilities. And I’d love to increase Sonia’s hours—she’s the psychiatrist—because we’re seeing a lot more girls with serious mental illness out there right now.”

Yvonne frowned. “Well, the psychiatrist’s hours, yes, I can get behind that. But as for the layoffs—it’s always our preference that my funds not be used as a stopgap for deficits in government funding. My board prefers not to dispense bail-out money.”

And this, Cora told herself, was why she hated philanthropists. Their dainty aversion to real emergency and distress, their careful gauging and hedging of risks, their preference, so politely and euphemistically stated, for supporting programs that didn’t really need help to stay open, but sure could use a shiny new foyer, complete with naming opportunity. This was what she hated about rich people: their discomfort with their own unsettling power to salvage and save, the fear of besiegement that comes with filling an ugly basic need, their distaste for the unavoidably vertical dynamic of dispensing money to people who have none. The way they prided themselves on never giving cash to homeless people on the street, preferring a suited, solvent, 501c3-certified middleman, who knew better. For Cora, the hardest part of running the drop-in was not the necrotized arm wounds, the ubiquity of urine and rot, the occasional OD in the bathroom, the collect calls from prison. It was the eternal quest for money, the need to justify, to immerse herself in the fuzzy, lateral terminology of philanthropy. Over the past ten years Cora had learned that donors don’t give a program dollars to save it from extinction; they “build a relationship” with the program. They want “partners,” not charity cases. And deep down, they believe in their hearts that people in real, urgent need—the kind of person Cora once was, and the kind she still felt like much of the time—make bad partners.

Cora cleared her throat. “Well,” she said, “increasing Sonia’s hours won’t do much good if we don’t have a roof for her to work under, or a way of bringing clients to her.”

She thought she saw Yvonne stiffen. Cora knew she was terrible at diplomacy. When she got angry, she preferred to yell; and if she were in front of the board of supervisors or the mayor’s staff instead of Yvonne Borneo, she would have. But this woman, this sleek, self-made authoress—that word, with its anachronistic, feline hiss of implied dilettantism, seemed made for her—had to be handled differently. She had no civic obligation to stem disease; she helped at her whim. It had to be some little thing that reeled her in, some ridiculous coincidence, some accident of fate. And Cora remembered her trump card.

There was no time to wait for a transition. She opened her mouth and prepared to blurt something out, something inappropriate and apropos of nothing—I knew your daughter when she was a dope fiend, maybe—when a pounding on the gate stopped her. Then a wailing. Someone was wailing her name.

Yvonne Borneo perked up so markedly her neck seemed to lengthen an inch. “Do you need to see to that?” she said.

Cora excused herself and went to the back gate. It was DJ, a regular client who had come to the door and screamed for her plenty of times before, but never when anyone important was present. Cora had once lanced a six-inch-long abscess on DJ’s arm—she’d measured it—and when the clinic doctor pared away the necrotized tissue, bone showed through. DJ had started coming to the women’s center at nineteen, freshly emancipated from foster care, clearly bipolar, and Cora had been trying to get her to see Sonia for seven years. She was twenty-six now and looked at least forty.

Today she looked worse than usual, in army pants held together with safety pins and a filthy tank top that revealed the caverns of scar tissue on her arms, the bulging sternum that seemed to twang fiercely under her skin like outraged tuning forks. When she saw Cora, DJ thrust both arms through the bars of the gate, like a prisoner in stocks, and wept.

“You came to see me when no one else did,” she sobbed.

“Okay, DJ,” Cora said. “Okay.”

DJ did this a lot: went back and forth in time. She was talking about when she’d been stabbed by a john two years before and Cora had been the only one to stay with her at SF General, eventually securing her a semiprivate room and making the nurse give her painkillers. “Yeah, she’s an addict,” she had snapped at the young woman on duty. “It still hurts when she gets stabbed.”

Sometimes DJ would recount an unknown past assault, or several, quietly sitting in the corner of the needle exchange and saying, “He raped me, Cora,” while peering through the twisted vines of her hair. “I know, hon,” Cora would say. “I’d cut his balls off if I could.” This always seemed to calm DJ down.

After Cora’s sister had a baby and the baby got older and began to speak in lucid sentences, its vocal patterns and flattened sense of chronology reminded Cora of DJ: that tendency to recount, repetitively, in the balanced and slightly bemused tones of a person under hypnosis, past events as though they had just happened. No “I remember this,” just “Mama dropped a plate and it broke,” meditatively, with an air of troubled, grieving reflection. It seemed to her that DJ, like the baby, was stuck in some cognitive cul-de-sac and, unlike the baby, would never develop a perspective layered and three-dimensional enough to find her way out.

Now Cora looked into her wet face and said, “DJ, I’ve got someone in there. Someone I’m having a meeting with. If you come back in an hour, when I open the exchange, we’ll talk. Okay?”

DJ gazed at her. “An hour?” she said hollowly.

“Yeah.”

The girl’s face began to twist and shift like there was something behind it, trying to get out. She slumped forward, forearms still resting on the bars of the gate, and moaned. Cora smelled alcohol and urine.

“DJ, please. One hour. I’ve got someone who might give us money in there, and I can’t just leave her sitting in my office.”

DJ slumped on the concrete, fingers still poking through the grates, and muttered, “Okay, okay, okay.”

When Cora returned and apologized to Yvonne, the novelist said, “Everything all right?” Before Cora could answer, the screaming started again. DJ was now banging her head against the metal bars of the gate and howling, “I’m sorry, I know there’s a rich lady in there, but I need to come in!”

Cora grabbed her ring of keys and hurried down the hall. It was starting to get dark outside, but she could see a wet patch of blood on DJ’s lip from the banging. When she unlocked the gate, DJ fell against her, almost gracefully. Cora staggered under the weight and struggled to dig her hands into the girl’s armpits, hoisting her up to standing. She lost her grip, and they collapsed together on the concrete floor. The crotch of DJ’s pants was soaked through. “It’s just so cold,” the girl slurred. “It’s just so cold out there. I keep peeing myself, Cora.”

Cora took DJ’s chin in her hands and looked into her eyes. They were unfocused and dilated, but not fixed. She was just very drunk.

“I can’t be out there right now.”

She pressed against Cora. They were entangled now on the floor of the hall, and Cora felt a hot dribble of urine slowly trickle across the floor underneath their bodies. “It hurts,” DJ said.

“I think you might have a UTI again, hon,” Cora said. “Remember when we talked about pissing right after you fuck?”

“She’s fancy,” DJ said.

At first Cora thought DJ was going back in time again, but then realized she was referring to Yvonne Borneo, who stood in the middle of the hallway in her gray suit, arms at her sides, projecting the deliberate, neutral composure of a wartime nurse—one of her own heroines, perhaps, kindly but remote and weighted with an incurable private grief.

“Is there anything I can do?” she said.

And so Yvonne Borneo helped Cora haul DJ into the bathroom. It was Yvonne who picked through the clothes bin and found clean pants and a sweatshirt, who went and bought three black coffees at the diner down the block while Cora helped DJ shower. And later, it was Yvonne who sat in the needle exchange with Lew, the volunteer, while the on-site nurse gave DJ a dose of antibiotics and Cora spent an hour trying to find her a shelter bed for the night. It was fruitless. There was nothing.

“What if we book a decent hotel room for her and you take her there in a cab, make sure she checks in?” Yvonne suggested.

Cora shook her head. “If she’s going overnight somewhere, it needs to be a place where people know what they’re doing.” She looked down at her lap. “The only option is to 5150 her.”

Yvonne didn’t ask what a 5150 was. She said, “Well, if the alternative is to be on the streets…” Her words trailed off. From the exam room came the sound of DJ alternately screaming and sobbing. The sounds were a kind of last gasp, witless and terrifying as the crunch before a piece of machinery breaks down for good. Cora stood up and shut the door to her office.

She made the call. Half an hour later, when the paramedics burst in the front door of the drop-in, four big burly men, louder and stompier than necessary in the way paramedics always are—the way anyone is, for that matter, who comes in the guise of eleventh-hour rescuer—and strapped DJ to a gurney, Cora ran alongside the stretcher and told the girl that things would be okay. But she knew this was unlikely, just as she knew her chances with Yvonne Borneo were blown, because the woman had borne witness to Cora’s greatest failure, a failure multiplied by the scores of clients just like DJ: girls who could not change. The part of them that knew how to accept help, whatever that part was called—hope? imagination? foresight?—had been destroyed. And what Cora and her staff did for such girls, day after day, felt more and more like hospice care: an attempt to minimize the worst of their pain until death.

Cora stood in the alley after the ambulance took off. It was Friday night and all the barkeeps along Mission and Valencia were dumping empty bottles into recycling bins. The sound of breaking glass seemed gratuitously destructive, nihilistic. She watched a woman walking down Capp Street in a short swingy coat and heels. A car pulled up alongside her and idled. Some idiot from Marin, thought Cora. The woman and the man in the car conferred for a moment, and the woman drew herself up and hurried down the sidewalk, shaking her head, outraged, as the vehicle pulled away.

When Cora came back into the exchange, Lew was alone.

“Where’s Yvonne Borneo?” she said.

“You mean that lady? That narc-looking lady?”

“Yes,” Cora sighed. “She left, didn’t she?”

Lew shrugged. “She left when the paramedics got here. She looked freaked.”

‘Did she say anything?’

“Nope. Maybe toodaloo or something.” He flapped his wrist.

Cora sat down. “She did not fucking say toodaloo.”

“No,” Lew admitted. “She did not.”

The first time Cora saw Yvonne’s daughter was in Ravenswood’s recreation room. They were both fifteen. She remembered Angelica as tall and big-framed and slumped, with choppy bangs and sidelong, slippery eyes, seemingly beyond nervousness and fear, reduced to the passive, grim spectatorship of an inured captive. There was sympathy in the look she gave Cora, but it was neutered, the retroactive ghost of sympathy you have for your own past, stupid self.

One of the other girls asked how long Cora would be staying.

“Not long,” Cora said, scared. Straining for flippancy. “Two weeks probably.”

Angelica laughed.

“That’s what we all thought,” she said. She spoke in Cora’s direction but didn’t look at her. Cora tried to snag her gaze but it kept floating away, elusive and directionless. Then Angelica turned to leave the room and that’s when she said the chilling thing, head down, so quiet and unassuming she could have been saying it to herself. “Honey,” she said, “you are never getting out of here.”

That night, her first at Ravenswood, Cora cried and sweated in her bed. Every fifteen minutes an aide came in and shone a flashlight on her. She wasn’t allowed to talk to her dad on the phone. “Can’t be a daddy’s girl forever,” one of the staff told her cheerfully. A dry-skinned, freckled woman wearing a sweatshirt with a grainy Georgia O’Keeffe flower scanned on the front. “You have a vagina on your shirt,” Cora told her. The woman’s mouth twisted into a tight, hurt smirk. “You need to grow up,” she said. “I won’t tell anyone what you said this time, but you need to start growing up.”

At night, Cora would watch the snow from the tiny window in the Chill Out Room. She’d discovered that if she said things like vagina and penis and fuck enough, she’d get sent to the Chill Out Room and could be alone and not have to talk to anyone or pretend to be listening. There was no toilet in there, so she tried to limit her beverage intake. The hours stretched on. Cora would sit on the floor, scowling at the aide who came by every half-hour to ensure that she hadn’t found an inventive way to hang herself. All the staff on the girls’ ward were women, soft and easily hurt but inflexible, vicious in a hand-wringing, motherly way. Turned-down mouths and sad, round faces. If you called one of these women a fucking twat, her eyes would fill up and her voice quaver with genuine injured dignity. Then she would tell you she was very sorry, but you couldn’t shower or change your underwear or socks until you apologized and admitted you were wrong. And the terrible thing was, she’d actually seem sorry. They were all perpetually cowed by their own brutality, quivering and defeated by the measures they were forced to enact. If Cora was nice to them, they were worse: unpardonably brisk and springy and relieved, presumptuous in their patting and hugging, insufferable in their tentative optimism. Their nonviolent and vaguely cutesy demands—that she sing show tunes in the bathroom to prove she wasn’t shooting up or purging, that she do three jumping jacks for every swear word uttered, that she participate in a sock-puppet revue dramatizing what she wanted her life to be like in five years—made her want to kill, and she envied the boys, who, it was rumored, merely got hog-tied and placed in restrictive holds.

When Cora got home after her meeting with Yvonne, she sat on the floor of her living room and did sudoku puzzles for two hours. Then she tried to sleep but couldn’t. The apartment was too quiet and she missed her cat, Melly, who had been dead for two weeks. Melly was a soothing, watchful, totemic presence, like a Buddha statue. She had a charming trait of standing on her two back feet for hours at a time, as if this was a restful position, her front legs hanging straight down from her chest, exposing the fur on her stomach, which was wavier and coarser than the rest. Cora and her friends had gathered round and laughed and marveled and taken pictures on their cell phones and praised Melly for being so cute and novel, until the day the vet informed Cora that Melly had advanced bone cancer and the reason she stood on her back feet was that it was the only position that alleviated her excruciating pain. Melly was put to sleep while Cora held her, whispering apologies, and she wanted to get another cat but was afraid of misinterpreting another signal, unwittingly laughing at another decline.

Melly’s food and water bowls were still in the kitchen, half full, the water filmed over with bits of fur on the rim, the corners of each room still hoarding tumbleweeds of cat hair. Cora wiped the rim of the water bowl with her thumb. She kept remembering Yvonne Borneo in the bathroom of the drop-in, kneeling on the floor in her taupe skirt, pulling off DJ’s army pants with grim, sharpened concentration. In those moments she seemed to have stepped into a transparent sleeve like the plastic sheaths on her novels, an invisible barrier that kept her from getting dirty. Not shying away from the wetness on DJ’s pants. Not wincing at the smell. But not registering it, either. At one point, she leaned over DJ, blotting at the girl’s bloody lip, and her Scottie-dog pin dinged against DJ’s nose. DJ blinked, started, stared at Yvonne as if she hadn’t seen her before.

“You’re taking my clothes off,” she murmured.

“Yes,” Yvonne said. “So you can clean up.”

“Oh, God,” DJ moaned. “Oh, God.” Then she squirmed to one side and planted her hands flat on the floor and vomited, not all at once but like a cat with a hairball, a series of back-arching, rippling convulsions.

“Get it all out,” Yvonne had said.

The phone rang. A man’s voice, clipped and high-pitched.

“Is this Cora Hennessey? Of Capp Street Women’s Services?”

“Yes,” Cora said.

Someone’s dead, she thought. DJ’s dead.

“My name is Josiah Lambeaux. I’m the personal assistant to Yvonne Borneo.”

“Okay,” Cora said.

It was raining. The ride to Yvonne Borneo’s house felt needlessly meandering, up and down hills and around curves in the dense foggy dark, the car’s lights occasionally isolating a frozen, fleeting image—a hooded man in a crosswalk, head bowed; a shivering sheaf of bougainvillea clinging to a stone wall; peeling layers of movie posters and LOST CAT signs and sublet notices trailing wet numbered tabs, plastered across the windows of vacant storefronts. Josiah drove his dove-gray sedan with the decorous effacement of a dad trying not to embarrass his teenage daughter, and she sat in the back and watched his thin neck tensing, his hands modestly manipulating the wheel with a pointed lack of gestural flair as they entered Seacliff, a hazy Land of the Lotus Eaters perched on the edge of the Presidio’s red-roofed orderliness: a mirage of wide, silent streets and giant lawns and strangely permeable-looking mansions, many of them white and turreted and vaporous in the dark, whose banks of windows turned a blind slate toward the bay and its light-spangled bridge. As they turned onto the mile-long, cypress-lined lane leading to Yvonne Borneo’s estate, Cora stuck her face an inch from the backseat window and imagined how hard it would be to run away from this place. Did Angelica break out under cover of night and run the entire mile from the front door to the road? What intricate alarm systems did she have to disassemble before she even crossed the threshold? And once she was free, adrift in this silent, echoing no-man’s-land of ghost-houses and yawning boulevards, how did she keep going? Having known nothing but this eerie greensward with its self-contradictory air of utter desertion and hyper-preservation, how did she know where to go, or even how to leave? Cora’s own leave-taking, at fourteen, was comparatively easy. She waited until the house was silent and sneaked out her bedroom window and climbed the backyard chain-link fence, to the road where her twenty-year-old boyfriend, Sammy, waited in his car. Her father barreled out the back door after her, chased her across the yard, grabbed the belt loop of her jeans, and pulled as she threw herself against the springy fence. She’d been shocked by how easily the fence swayed and shuddered as she clung to it. The change she’d filled her pockets with—pennies mostly—poured out, spattering on the ground and hitting her father in the face and arms. As he clutched her ankle, his eyes were screwed shut against the shower of coins and so he didn’t see the foot of her free leg swinging toward him with all the lethal agility of the gymnast she’d once aspired to be, and he could only reel back, shocked, as the heel of her boot stomped down on his face.

She broke his nose. Her poor father who was only trying to protect his little girl from statutory rape at the hands of the druggie boy she adored. The weird sexual territoriality of fathers, some ancient holdover from the days of dowries and bloody marital sheets. Even then, she knew it was about his ego, his deflowered honor, not hers. When Sammy overdosed and she came crawling back home, strung out and incoherent, her father wouldn’t let her in the house or even talk to her. He sent her to Utah, where Angelica was.

During the moral inventory phase of the twelve steps, she called her father and apologized.

“I’m sorry I broke your nose and put you through all that worry and mess,” she said.

He seemed dumbfounded. “I don’t even like to think about that,” he said. “As far as I’m concerned, it never happened. You are what you are now, and that’s who my daughter is. You. Not that other person.”

“But I have to make amends, Dad,” she said.

He said, “You can’t make amends for something that never happened.”

As the sedan reached the end of the lane and the house reared up before them, Cora forced herself to take deep breaths. Josiah parked and opened the passenger door for her, and she followed him past a row of topiaries and rose bushes, the heads of the flowers bowed by the rain. The house was a giant whitewashed box of sparkling stone, vaguely French Regency, wrought-iron balconies jutting from huge, blue-shuttered casement windows. As she and Josiah walked to the front door, a series of motion-sensor floodlights clicked on, one after the other, dogging their steps.

Yvonne Borneo was waiting for them in the vestibule.

“Cora!” she exclaimed. “You made it!”

Then she hugged Cora. She wore silk lounge pants and a gauzy tunic, and Cora, chin pressed against the novelist’s dry, soft neck, smelled lily of the valley and starch.

“Thank you for having me,” Cora said. During their embrace, Josiah had vaporized; they were alone in a high-ceilinged foyer of slate and marble.

“You are such a tiny thing,” Yvonne said, sorrowfully looking Cora up and down.

Dinner was dished out by Josiah: skirt steak and buttered carrots and parsley potatoes on ceramic serving platters. When he produced a bottle of red wine and plucked Cora’s glass by its stem, she held up her hand.

“No,” she said. “No, thank you.”

“It’s an excellent wine,” he said.

“I don’t drink.”

She’d been saying this for fifteen years, and the reaction was always the same: a wide-eyed, almost abject solicitude as the implications of the statement were processed. Then an abashed hush. Josiah poured her a glass of water.

As soon as Josiah left the room, Yvonne leaned forward slightly and looked at Cora. A centerpiece of bare black branches sat between them. She gently pushed it aside.

“I wanted to have you over to apologize to you, in person,” she said, “for leaving so abruptly last night.”

“Oh, no,” Cora said. “No, I understand. I figured you had to get going.”

Yvonne kept gazing at her. “It was hard for me,” she said slowly, “to see someone in that condition.”

“Of course,” Cora said.

“How is DJ?”

“Well, they’ve got her on a forty-eight-hour hold. So…” Cora shrugged. “I guess at least she’s detoxing right now. And maybe she’ll have a shelter bed by the time she’s out.”

Yvonne looked down. “I don’t know how you do it,” she murmured. “Every single day. How you don’t lose hope.”

Cora surprised herself by saying, “Oh, I do. I just pretend that I don’t.”

Yvonne looked up, staring at her sharply, and Cora had a peculiar sensation of loosening, uncurling, and pushing off with a fortifying heedlessness that was liberating and bleak. If she still drank, she would have taken a gulp of wine at that moment. In her mind she saw money, coins and coins of it, running through her fingers.

“May I ask you a question?” Yvonne said.

Cora nodded.

“Why did you leave home?”

Cora had told the story of her downward spiral in front of countless donors. After years of twelve-step testimony she could easily slide into the instructive, talking-points tone this spiel seemed to demand. She always began with a disclaimer: My parents weren’t abusive. Which makes me different from most runaways. Measured, wide-eyed, absolving everyone of everything. I made a choice. And she opened her mouth to say it again and found that she couldn’t.

What she heard herself saying instead was “I was in love with an older guy, and I wanted to have sex with him.”

Yvonne’s fingers closed around the stem of her wineglass. She frowned.

“And that’s why you left home?”

“Pretty much,” Cora said. “My parents didn’t let me date. They were really, really afraid I’d turn into a slut. I mean, preoccupied with the possibility I’d turn into a slut. As in, every rule they made revolved around protecting me from that fate. And, um, I wanted to have sex. So.”

Yvonne looked grave and slightly stricken.

Cora kept going. “And this guy got me into drugs, and then he overdosed and I just went crazy. I kind of wanted to die with him. And I think it was mourning, the whole time I was on the street like that. I could say to you that I was a bad, bad girl and experimenting and rebelling, or whatever, but I really do think it was my way of mourning. And I could say there was one big, defining experience that changed me and made it okay, but there wasn’t. It’s still not okay. It’ll never be okay. I just eventually stopped mourning.”

Yvonne said, “But you got off the drugs. You made a life for yourself.”

“The other thing was a life too.”

Yvonne looked dismayed. “But what kind of life? Strung out, on the streets? Addicted to drugs?” Her voice trailed off, and she toyed with her fork.

Cora laughed, meanly. She was suddenly very angry. She had been waiting, she realized, for this chance since the moment they had met. Since before.

“Believe me,” she said. Her voice was deliberate and low, feeling its way. “No one would do drugs if they weren’t fun. The drugs are what I miss the most.”

She laughed again, this time with disbelief at having said it out loud. But it was true.

Yvonne gracefully nudged her glass aside and cradled her chin in one long-fingered hand.

“I wouldn’t really know,” she said evenly.

Cora blurted out, “I was with your daughter at Ravenswood.”

Yvonne stared.

“I don’t know how long she was there. I was only there for a month. That’s the way it worked, you know, if your parents couldn’t afford to keep paying, they’d get told you were cured. And if your parents were rich enough, you were never cured.”

In the dimness Yvonne’s face seemed to tighten into facets, like a diamond, each outraged angle giving off light. And Cora kept going. She couldn’t stop.

“That place was, excuse me, a mind fuck. They made up a diagnosis and made you try to fit it. Which may have been what they did to Angelica. Who I only saw once or twice, because I was stuck in a tiny padded room, alone, most of the time.”

Her voice was unrecognizable to her ears: ragged, lashing, corrosive. Almost breaking. When she yelled at City Hall, it was mostly a put-on: she was angry, but she also knew she had to seem sane, galvanizing, in the right. Now she was simply ranting. Ranting at the millionaire who had invited her to dinner. And she couldn’t stop.

“I was a junkie when I went in there,” she said. “Like your daughter. And as soon as I got out, I couldn’t wait to go do some drugs. I felt lucky to be out of that place and doing drugs again.”

She was out of breath. For years she had counseled parents, engineered reconciliations, built bridges for girls to reconnect with their estranged families. Even if those families had made terrible mistakes, like sending their daughters to offshore boot camps, beating them, disowning them for getting raped or pregnant. No matter how awful the parents had been, they clung to Cora; they called her and told her how much they loved their daughters. They said things like, “You don’t have to tell me where she is; just tell her that I love her.” They cried. They listened to her with the chastened raptness of converts. They did what she suggested. And if their daughters came back or pulled themselves clear and forgave their parents, Cora thanked God she’d been patient, bitten her tongue, refused to say the very things she was now saying to Yvonne Borneo.

Yvonne picked up her napkin.

“Let me stop you right there, please, Cora,” she said. Her voice was calm.

“I still—”

“Please,” Yvonne said. “Please.”

She waited until Cora became uncomfortable enough with the silence to sit back, with poor grace, and say, “All right.”

“I think,” Yvonne said, “I wanted to meet you because I knew something about your past. I knew you were a runaway. And on some level I wanted to see you and find out about you. I wanted to find out why you survived and my daughter didn’t.”

She folded her hands and cleared her throat, and when she resumed speaking her voice slackened, sagging with the dead weight of futile certainty. “It’s because she was schizophrenic, that’s what you’d tell me. And maybe you’d be right. But let me ask you this. If the situations were reversed, if you had been the one to die, and if Angelica were sitting in front of your parents right now and saying how awful Ravenswood was, what a mistake they made, what would your parents tell her?”

Cora’s mouth was parched. The bitten shreds of her lips stuck together when she tried to separate them.

“I don’t know,” she said.

Yvonne’s mouth stretched into a desolate smile.

“I’ll tell you,” she said. “They’d say exactly what I’m about to. They’d say, ‘My daughter was an ocean underneath an ocean.’ And it would be true. I see these girls on the streets, girls like DJ, the girls in your drop-in, and I know every single one of them is someone’s daughter. And to their own parents, every single one of them is an ocean underneath an ocean.” She tapped her index finger on the table in rhythm with the words. “Fathoms and fathoms deep. A complete mystery. My daughter is completely unfathomable to me. And certainly, if I may say so, to you.”

Cora balled her fists under the table. She knew she should be mollified—if this were a TV show, she would be cowed before the unassailable authority of maternal privilege—but she was furious, burning, convinced that nothing had ever made her angrier than this: this artful abdication of responsibility, this consigning of every lost daughter to a communal slag heap of pretty Persephones. She remembered her father’s voice on the phone, telling her, “You can’t make amends for something that never happened.” How matter-of-factly he had absolved her of everything. How she wished she could accept his words as a gift and pretend they didn’t feel like a swift and brutal erasure of her entire adolescence as though it were some wartime atrocity, a stack of bodies to be buried and sprinkled with lime. He had excised a part of her and left it on the cutting-room floor. And when he reminisced about her growing up, as he occasionally did on her birthday and when he’d been drinking late at night and watching sentimental films on American Movie Classics, he selectively focused on those childhood behaviors that predicted and explained Cora’s choice of career. How she’d always had a charitable bent. Defended smaller children from bullies. Brought home injured baby birds. Cried when starving Ethiopians were on the news. A Florence Nightingale whitewash, obscuring the simple fact that she cared about homeless junkie underage prostitutes because she used to be one. She knew what it was like to be Angelica in a way Yvonne Borneo could never know.

“My parents,” she said, “would never say that. Because I am not the same person as your daughter. I don’t look at what happened to Angelica and think there but for the grace of God go I. We’re all different. We’re all different people!”

She was sputtering now, losing her eloquence, letting herself go in a way she never had before, and in her mind she saw the drop-in shuttered, saw herself somewhere else, working in an art store, maybe, or walking the streets of a strange city, or telling an entirely new subset of people what she used to be and what it meant, giving it a new spin, all the dead and dying girls of the Mission as distant and abstract to her as Bosnian war orphans, as famine victims, far away and someone else’s problem, and she remembered how, at the moment the phone rang in her apartment the night before, there was a panicked, nonsensical moment in which she thought, she knew, it was Angelica. It was Angelica, calling to tell her something about her mother. To say be gentle with her, because she’s in pain. Every moment of the day she’s in pain. And Cora lifted her eyes from her plate and said, “You’re not going to give me any money, are you?” When her voice shook, she didn’t know if it was with despair or relief.

Honey, you are never getting out of here.

She was dimly aware of the thin and careful form of Yvonne Borneo getting up from her chair and walking around the table. Then there was a hand on her shoulder—experimental, inquisitive, in the manner of a cat testing its balance on some unfamiliar surface.

Cora peered through her fingers. The novelist’s face was inches from her own. Her brown eyes were very still and steady. Cora knew she was being shown something, that Yvonne was allowing some skimmed-away sediment to settle and collect in her dark eyes, in the grooves of her face, in the curves of her mouth. The look she gave Cora conveyed neither reproach nor remorse. What did it convey? Cora would never really know. She could only register something old and muddied and orphaned between them, a helpless moat of transference, brimming with the run-off of two people whose primary identities were, in the eyes of each other, not that of philanthropist and beneficiary, or writer and caregiver, but of someone else’s mother and someone else’s child. And it was this—this ancient ooze of crossed signals, this morass of things unsaid—that made Cora lower her forehead to Yvonne’s shoulder and whisper, “She loved you. I could tell that she loved you,” as the novelist stroked her hair the way Cora once imagined her stroking the head of a fox stole, automatically, with the phantom tenderness of a hand toward an object that is not the right thing at all, but is soft at least, and warm.