Inside

FIVE

New York, 2002

THE CHILD EXISTED for the three of them in many ways — as a bone of contention, a zone of negotiation, a locus of arguments, a reminder of sex, a sore spot, a tender spot, a sweet spot — before it existed in the world.

Hilary’s body encased both the baby and herself in flesh and placidity; she could not be touched. At times, Anne couldn’t stop looking at her. What was it like to grow so massive, to be a container so uncontained? Huge and getting huger, she put on pounds every day, eating gallons of ice cream and boxes of saltine crackers and even T-bone steaks that Anne, who in all her time in New York had never even noticed a butcher shop, brought home for her.

Meanwhile her boyfriend, too, bulked up. He spent several hours a day doing pushups and weights — he’d found a set of barbells on the street — in a corner of the living room he claimed as his own, a masculine realm marked by fitness magazines, the barbells, a pair of stinky running shoes. He was working as a framer on some construction site in Queens, and between that work and the lifting his skinny body was broadening; there was a rope of muscle along his neck and shoulders, also nascent biceps and thicker forearms. It was as if he thought that when it came to fatherhood, muscles were what would be required.

At least he was working, and Anne hoped he was putting money away. She had no idea what would become of them once the baby came and they moved out of her apartment. Or she assumed they would move out. When she tried to talk to Hilary about all this, her mask of placidity would break and she’d start to cry, her pale, milky face blotchy and streaked. “We’re going to figure it out,” she’d say weepily, which sounded less like a promise than a pallid, inadequate reassurance to herself and her unborn child. Feeling guilty, Anne would drop the subject. Nobody likes to make a pregnant woman cry.

One day she came home to find Alan by himself, lifting weights in the corner. “Where’s Hilary?” she said.

He grunted and ignored her, his thin face straining with effort.

She couldn’t think of another time when the two of them had ever been alone together. Hilary was always there, her body a buffer between them. Alan reached down and picked up a heavier barbell. They were his prized possessions, these weights, and they gleamed in the light. He faced the window, curling his biceps and panting with every lift. She stepped closer to him — he smelled sweaty and gross — and tried to catch his eye, but he wouldn’t look away from his muscles.

“Listen,” she said. “You know you guys can’t stay here forever. I hope you’re saving some money. Once the baby comes, you’re going to have to support them. You’re going to have to grow up.”

But once she’d delivered these lines she felt ridiculous. What did she know about supporting a family? She had been in Hilary’s position once, and had made the opposite choice. She’d left her parents behind too, getting as far away as she could from any kind of family. Thinking back on it, she could barely remember what thoughts had guided her decisions, or if she had had any thoughts at all. That time in her life was a blur of hate: her father was awful, her mother pathetic, both of them so self-absorbed they barely noticed anything she did. Anything she had made of herself, she’d accomplished without them. The one person who’d been kind to her back then was her therapist, and that was only because it was Grace’s job. Thinking about this made her angry all over again, and the anger flowed onto Alan, whose only reaction to her statement had been to shift the barbell from one hand to the other. She could see his lips moving as he counted repetitions.

“Have you even thought about where you’re going to live?”

With a groan, he set the weight down. He was wearing a dirty tank top and his white skin shimmered with sweat. When he straightened up, his face was flushed with blood. “Why don’t you shut up?” he said.

Anne felt a physical ripple across her face, as if he’d slapped her. “Excuse me?”

“You act like you know everything. But you don’t. Just mind your own business.”

“Hard to do when you’re living in my apartment.”

“So you think you can boss us around? Act like you’re better than us?”

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

“You’re just some stuck-up bitch,” he said, turning away.

Flashing with anger, sparks in her veins, she grabbed his arm and yanked it. She could tell he was surprised by how strong she was. “You shut the fuck up,” she said. “You’re nothing. Nothing. You owe me.”

Her fingernails scraped his clammy skin as he pulled his arm away, and she liked what she saw in his eyes. He was scared.

May came to the city, the bloom of trees a wistful pink against a pale sky. In the parks the memorials were fading, the pictures of the missing now gray and tearing around the edges. Old dried flowers bobbed their stiff heads in the wind; jars that had once held candles lay empty on their sides. The streets seemed ribboned with litter. And yet the weather was pretty, and people gathered at tables outside restaurants, glad to feel the sun on their faces again.

Anne’s play opened, and she was good in it; she knew she was. The audiences were tiny, mostly hipsters and college-theater nerds who went to see everything, but it was enough. There were reviews in two weeklies, and one called her performance “compelling.” She cut the reviews out and pasted them in a scrapbook next to the playbill, something she hadn’t done since high school.

She gave Hilary and Alan tickets for a Friday-night show, and when they didn’t turn up she was angrier than she would’ve expected. She had sacrificed her apartment to these runaways, and they couldn’t even get it together to sit through two hours of theater? And the worst part was that she couldn’t get mad at them, because the whole deal, the basis of the relationship, was that they needed her, not the other way around. To tell them she was disappointed would have been to lose whatever thin emotional edge she still possessed. She assumed Alan had told Hilary about their confrontation, and that was why they hadn’t come.

When she got home that night, though, they weren’t there. This was more than unusual — they spent every night in front of the TV. Maybe they’d gotten lost on the subway? They were just two teenagers from the country. But they had left their families, without a word of explanation, and probably their parents had stood silent and gape-mouthed in their homes, just like she was now, wondering where they were.

At three in the morning, sleepless, she heard the door open. She went to the living room and saw Alan leading Hilary to the couch.

“What happened? Is everything okay?”

“She had a fever and kept throwing up.” Alan’s voice was gentle. “We went to the emergency room. We were worried it was going to hurt the baby.”

“And what did they say?” Anne turned on the fluorescent light in the kitchen, and in its blue glow Hilary looked wan, her face an uneasy gray.

“It was food poisoning, they told us. We think from Panda Kitchen.”

“What are we supposed to do? Does she need some water? I could get some ginger ale.”

Alan shook his head. “They put her on an IV for a while, so right now it’s okay. She probably just wants to sleep.”

In other words, she understood, go back to bed and leave us alone. “What about the baby? Is the baby going to be all right?”

“Doc said no problem,” Alan said. “Young healthy mom, should be a young healthy baby.”

“Okay.” At the bedroom door she turned around and said, “I’m sorry.” She waited for him to say it was all right, but he didn’t.

In the morning Hilary’s face still looked bad, as waxy as fake fruit. She kept pawing at the blanket around her and shifting her massive weight around the tiny couch.

“I’m cold,” she said. “I’m hot. I don’t feel good. My skin hurts. I have a fever.” She threw these statements into the air, expecting someone to catch them. Alan wanted to stay home from work, but Anne told him he should go; she’d be home all day and could take care of her.

“I’m sweaty,” Hilary said. “My clothes stink. I’m dizzy.”

Feeling at once guilty and pitying, Anne said, “Maybe you should sleep in my bed instead. It’s probably more comfortable.”

Which is how she came to give up her bedroom and live on the couch herself.

It made more sense, really. Hilary spent her days beached on the bed, reminding Anne of her mother, who in the difficult time before Anne left home had passed most weekends this way. Her mother stole into her mind more and more often these days — her voice, her smell, her small, pleading smile, the childhood games they’d played. Anne would never have admitted she missed her; these thoughts were probably just from being around Hilary, wondering what kind of mother she was going to be.

Once Hilary was settled on the bed she treated it as her unassailable kingdom, her lily pad, her island. Every time Anne came back to the apartment, even before closing the door, she would hear Hilary calling her name from the bedroom. Then she would glance through the doorway and see her propped up on cushions, a National Enquirer open beside her, its pages crumpled from where she’d napped on them, a plate of half-eaten food on the nightstand, the bed dotted with candy wrappers and tissues.

“Anne? Could you bring me some ice cream?”

For her entertainment the television had been moved into the bedroom. Alan had moved in there too, but he still slept on a pallet on the floor beside her. Day by day Hilary was becoming more childlike, unable to do anything for herself, but she was also growing more demanding and physically imposing, a capricious giant whose whims must be appeased.

Anne would deliver a bowl of her favorite flavor, chocolate, with sprinkles on top. If someone had told her a year earlier that she’d be serving ice cream to a strange girl in her apartment, she wouldn’t even have laughed. But now this stranger took it without thanking her and pointed at the screen, where a sitcom family was hashing out their differences over the kitchen table, the laughs ceding to a heart-to-heart talk, the teenage kids expressing contrition and shame.

“God, I’m glad I don’t live there,” Hilary said.

Anne nodded. “Me too.”

Success came when she was least interested in it, much less desperate for it. This gave her a nonchalant confidence, an ability to take risks, that made her a better actress. The director loved her performances so much he wanted to die every single night. He also floated the idea of sleeping with her, which Anne previously would have considered the cost of doing business. But now she turned him down and he didn’t seem to hold it against her, just renewed his efforts every once in a while, as did others in the cast and crew, confirming that she’d become a valuable commodity.

Her phone rang with offers to audition, to join workshops, to pose for photographs. Apparently what she’d heard about one break was true, how momentum starts and picks up speed. Three agents contacted her; two took her out for expensive lunches. She had new head shots made. The run on the current play was extended. Anne basked in all of it, and each night she stretched herself out, emotionally naked, unafraid, in front of the audience. Once it came to her, the attention she’d been fighting for during these months of struggle (now that they were past, she could admit that’s what they’d been) felt destined, nothing less than her due.

The guy she’d been seeing, Magnus, only got sweeter in the face of this success. He took her out to dinner to celebrate; he brought flowers to every Saturday-night performance; he made all his friends come see the play and then stay for drinks with Anne afterward. On off nights, he had her over to his place and cooked dinner. The only problem was that he asked questions she wasn’t inclined to answer. In New York people seemed to take intense pleasure in laying out their romantic and family histories to one another. You were supposed to be open about everything — even your neuroses; especially your neuroses — and chart a map of your interior life.

Anne couldn’t do it. She didn’t like to talk about her family and said only that she had left home at a young age and wasn’t in touch with them. She might have been able to get away with this, because Magnus was falling in love with her and she could tell he was constructing his own version of her life story in his mind. Her reticence must have been rooted in a tragic past, and the details of her survival would be coaxed out of her only by the right person at the right time. He was willing to wait and prove to her that he was that person, the long-awaited prince who could wake her with a kiss.

The other problem, though, was her apartment. He had walked her to the building several times, but she never let him come up. Anne could see why this bothered him, but she couldn’t let him know about Hilary and Alan. That was just too hard to explain. She wasn’t even sure she could explain it to herself. So she’d say, “Maybe later. I’m tired tonight. Soon.”

At first they joked about it. Magnus asked if she was extremely messy, or had a pet tiger, or — and she could hear the edge in his voice — if she was married, and she always laughed and denied everything.

What he said was, “I don’t want to make this a condition. I’m not into demands or anything, but I just think it’s a little weird. If this is how you want it, Anne, okay, but …” The final word was always but. It was probably the last word he ever said to her. Things between them didn’t so much end as slip away. He stopped coming to every show, then stopped coming at all, and she let him go with more regret than she’d anticipated. He would have been the perfect man for some other, better version of herself.

It was Anne who found a doctor for Hilary, because as far as she could tell the girl had made no effort to do so. She was so strong-willed most of the time that Anne tended to forget that she didn’t have much common sense. She treated pregnancy like a bad cold, something that called for a lot of bed rest and fluids. When Anne started asking about ultrasounds and tests, Hilary shook her head.

“I don’t have insurance,” she said.

“There are places you can go,” Anne pointed out.

“Not that I’d want to go to.”

“I don’t think you have a choice.”

Lying propped on pillows, Hilary gestured vaguely at her belly. “Women have been doing this, like, forever,” she said. “I’m young. I’m built for this.”

“Women have been dying in childbirth forever too,” Anne said.

From the other room, Alan called, “Hey! Don’t be scaring her and shit! She’s scared enough already.”

“Are you?” Anne said.

The girl gazed back at her, blank-eyed, and shrugged. This was her apparent defense: to go blank. Whatever fear or anger was lurking inside that house, nobody would get to see.

But some things you can’t let slide. So Anne spent an afternoon calling around until she found a clinic on the Lower East Side that could offer them an appointment the next day, then told Hilary that she’d take her.

“Hey, what about me?” Alan said.

“Don’t you have to work?” Anne said, sounding more unfriendly than she’d meant to.

“I’ll take a day off.”

“What about the money?”

“It’s just money,” Alan said, looking at her like she was the one with messed-up priorities. “This is about the baby.”

“If you’re so into the baby, how come you didn’t make her go to the doctor?”

In response to this the boy flushed darkly. He was a weird kid, by turns watchful and wary, and often he seemed more like Hilary’s servant than her boyfriend. He’d flare with anger and dip into sulks, and there were days when he didn’t speak at all. Yet Anne saw clearly how her question pained him, how bad he felt, how confused and unprepared. How determined to do what was right. How helpless to do it.

He did take the day off, but Anne insisted on going too, feeling they needed adult supervision. So the three of them got on the subway together, Alan finding Hilary a seat and standing in front of her like a bodyguard. In the waiting room, Anne gathered up every available pamphlet and stuffed them in her purse. The clinic was run by a women’s health organization and staffed by earnest young college graduates wearing handwoven sweaters and political buttons. On the walls were peeling posters that seemed to have been there since the seventies. Yo amo la leche, said a happy, smiling baby. Most of the patients sat with their hands folded in their laps, staring down at their bodies as if expecting them to explain how they’d gotten into this mess.

When the nurse called Hilary’s name Anne and Alan jumped to attention, but she barely looked up, just nodded sleepily and slowly got to her feet.

They were shepherded into the tiny examination room, which was painted a dingy color between tea and coffee and didn’t seem especially clean. Anne felt a pang of panic. What if something terrible happened? What would she do? The answer came to her instantly, from her darkest, truest recesses: Run.

Alan stood next to Hilary, who was lying on the table, and held her hand. Anne knew he wouldn’t run. He might not know what to do, but he wouldn’t run. She pushed aside some dog-eared copies of Good Housekeeping and Redbook, magazines no teenage mother would want to read, and sat down in a chair.

The doctor came in and said cheerfully, “Little crowded in here!” She looked about Anne’s age, a crunchy type with a pencil in her hair, wearing clogs.

“Can we all stay?” Anne said.

“Why don’t we ask the pregnant lady?” the doctor said. Hilary nodded her assent. “Okay, then! Let’s get started.”

It was the kind of place where they didn’t scold you for not having come in sooner; they were more about making sure you came back. So Hilary was lavished with praise for being so healthy, for making the appointment, practically for brushing her teeth and eating ice cream. She didn’t say much in response, just submitted to the examination with her legs open and her eyes focused on a spot on the wall. The doctor peeled off her latex gloves with an audible snap and said, “Looks great!” and then set up the ultrasound. And there it was, a black-and-white shadow puppet swimming in its dark pool. “Organs look good. Fingers and toes all there,” the doctor reported. “Do you want to know the sex of the baby?”

“Yes,” Hilary said.

“It’s a little girl.”

Anne, who was still gazing at the screen, heard a strange sound and saw that Hilary was crying. “I wanted a girl,” she said.

That night, there was an appreciative crowd at the small theater in Long Island City, holding its breath, taut with attention. Anne’s dialogue and gestures had by now become a part of her, as deep in her body as her muscles and bones. She had moved beyond conscious thought, beyond having to remember lines, toward a state of pure energy and flow. She was Mariska, and there was no boundary between where she left off and her character began. It didn’t feel like acting, more like being. It was the happiest she’d ever felt, those two hours in front of the audience, but after it was over she was deflated. It was like having a dream about flying that seems so true and possible, then waking up to understand it wasn’t real and never would be.

The subway trip home was long, but she didn’t want to waste money on cabs or car services. She had started saving money for the baby, wanting to give her something she could rely on later, when and if other people let her down. Back at the apartment, she undressed in the dark with a minimum of noise or fuss and crawled between blankets on the couch. The place smelled of leftover pizza. She sighed. Sometime soon this phase would be over, and she would understand what it was all about, how Hilary and Alan fit into the story of her life.

Lying there strangely keyed up, she heard a moaning sound and sat up to listen. Another moan, the bed creaking, Alan making a choking sound. She squashed the pillow over her head, trying not to hear them, the runaways, the interlopers, the children about to become parents. Making love in her bed.

A month passed, and the summer grew brutal and steaming. Anne’s play closed and she was temping again, trying to put aside more money. Out of all the offers that had coursed around her during the run of the play, only a few had distilled to anything concrete. She picked the one with a well-regarded experimental director whose trademark was deadpan dialogue and sacklike clothing, the actors’ bodies virtually irrelevant in his productions. She hoped the play would stretch her capacities and prove her artistic mettle. So she stood on stage in scratchy burlap and muttered lines she didn’t understand to an audience of bored hipsters in a church basement. Without her body to work with, she had no idea what to do. Too afraid to admit she didn’t understand the aesthetic agenda, she bumbled her part, alienated the director, and got terrible reviews. Just like that, she felt like she was back to where she started.

“You’re a pretty girl,” the agent she had decided on said over a drink. “Let me get you into commercials. There’s a detergent call that would be perfect for you.”

“I don’t want to do commercials,” Anne told her.

The agent shrugged. “I guess I can try for Law & Order.”

“Okay, but I also want something serious. Something important.”

The agent raised her eyebrows. “You’re a pretty girl,” she repeated. “Work with your strengths.”

A week later, the agent called to say she’d gotten her into summer theater in Southampton. “It isn’t Williamstown, but you can hit the beach.”

The play was okay. The people who came to see it were a little buzzed, on vacation, ready to be entertained, complimenting Anne extravagantly and buying her drinks afterward in the bar. She had rented a room from a group of hard-partying young lawyers and slept wearing earplugs. Early in the mornings she ran on the beach and saw herself, in these moments, as if from a great distance: a beautiful young woman, hair streaming behind her, the Atlantic crashing its gentle, gray waves. She enjoyed imagining herself like this, from the point of view of some infinitely knowledgeable and enamored stranger, someone who could tell even from afar just how special she was.

On a sweltering Sunday afternoon in July she returned to the city and found the apartment surprisingly cool; air-conditioning units had been installed in both rooms. The shades were drawn and the lights were off. “Hello?” she said, dropping her bags. “You guys home?”

No one was in the bedroom, and the food in the refrigerator was spoiling. There was an air of dust and abandonment that somehow felt new.

Then a key turned in the lock, and a middle-aged man she’d never seen before walked in.

“Get out of here,” she said instinctively. “I’m calling the police.”

Holding his hands up in deference, he looked afraid, even though he was well built and no doubt stronger than she was. He was wearing khaki pants and a short-sleeved plaid shirt. “Hey, now,” he said. “You must be Anne.”

“Who are you?”

“I’m Ned Halverson.” He paused, apparently expecting some reaction, then exhaled and lowered his hands. “Hilary’s uncle.”

Anne frowned. Hilary’s last name was Benson; she’d never mentioned an uncle. “Where is she?”

The man sighed. “Do you mind if I sit down for a second?” he said. “Those stairs just about kill me, in this heat.”

He moved to the couch, where she noticed a small brown suitcase on the floor and a folded set of sheets on the cushions. He sat with his hands on his knees, back perfectly straight, a military pose. Then, reaching into his rear pocket, he pulled out a handkerchief and wiped off his forehead.

“Hilary told me about everything you’ve done for her,” he said. “I mean to say, she didn’t. She always makes out like she did it all herself, but it’s clear to me that you’ve done a lot. Letting her stay here. And then Alan.” From the way he said his name, it was obvious there was no love lost between them.

“Where are they?” Anne said.

Halverson raised an eyebrow. “She was supposed to leave you a note,” he said, “but she didn’t, did she? That girl was never any too good at following instructions.”

Anne glanced around. “I just got here,” she said.

Halverson seemed perfectly at ease on the couch and uninterested in clearing up her confusion. She walked over to the kitchen counter, then glanced into the bedroom, which was unusually tidy and free of clutter. The bed was made. Somehow this seemed more ominous than anything else.

Back in the living room, she said, “No note. Why don’t you tell me what’s going on? Did you make Hilary go home?”

“Well, now, of course I did,” he said. “My wife took them straight away, and I’m here for the rest of their things. I’m sure you understand. We been worried sick to death. She’s just a kid herself, you know. We can take care of her, and once the baby comes …” He spread his hands out wide. With his ramrod posture and slow, deliberate delivery, the gesture reminded her of the old men who practiced tai chi in Tompkins Square Park. Anne couldn’t quite grasp what he was saying but felt irritated, then enraged, that circumstances had changed without her consent. There must have been plenty of drama — Hilary never would have left willingly — and she had missed all of it. If she had been here, would things have been different? Would they have fought harder to stay?

“You know my son means well,” he said. “I mean, I think he does, anyway, but it’s hard to say what’s going on in that pinhead of his. Sometimes I just lose patience. It’s like he’s got no common sense at all. And the worst part is that he can’t see around his own ideas, he’s built them up so big. He’s bullheaded. My wife says I am too and that’s why we don’t get along. I tell her, that’s just what you say so we can keep loving him when he acts like an idiot.”

He seemed prepared to ramble on like this indefinitely. Anne sat down on the chest in front of the couch. “What are you talking about?”

Halverson rested his palms on his knees again. “My son Alan, of course.”

It turned out, as she should have guessed, that everything Hilary had said about her family was a lie. Halverson told her the whole story without ever relaxing his military bearing, and she believed him not because he seemed more credible but because she knew Hilary and had once been just like her, and therefore understood how fluidly lies come, how easily they spill from you once you get into the habit of telling them.

There was no abuse at home, according to Halverson, and Hilary, his sister’s daughter, had been a good kid. Her parents ran a small farm, and she grew up tending to the cows and the chickens, more at ease with them, it seemed, than she was with people. But both her parents were killed in a car accident when she was ten, and she moved in with Halverson and his family.

“It was weird how it didn’t seem to affect her,” he said. “She didn’t cry, or even talk about them much. We had a counselor over in Hawkington that we were taking her to for a while, but she seemed to be okay. There’s something about her that’s just … steely, you know what I mean?”

Anne nodded. Unconsciously she had mirrored Halverson’s pose, sitting across from him on the chest with her hands on her knees. Noticing this, she shifted her weight and crossed her legs.

Halverson didn’t need much encouragement to keep talking. He seemed to think it was his duty; in exchange for having housed Hilary, Anne would get this story from him. “She lived with us till she was around fourteen, then things went all haywire. I guess it’s the hormones that set in around that age. I don’t know. The kids in our town are like wildcats. One minute they’re normal and the next thing you know, you can’t contain them. Out of control.”

He sighed. This, she could tell, was the hard part of the story. “What happened?” she said.

“Oh.” Halverson made another slow, vague wave, as if she could surmise from this what he was going to tell her. When Anne said nothing, he sighed again. Still she said nothing. She could wait him out, she knew, because most men — most people — can’t stand silence. Less than a minute passed before he broke down, speaking faster than he had before.

“Comes to pass that my wife gets home one day and finds Alan and Hilary together in her little pink bedroom. The stuffed animals flung around. Bunnies on the floor. It horrified her. She was so upset by it that she threw them all away. I think she just couldn’t stand the idea, you know, of those little-girl things being in the room with Hilary and Alan. You understand it wasn’t just that they were cousins, or so young. It was both things together. And somehow — sure, they were still children — there was something about it that wasn’t innocent. You know?”

Anne nodded, knowing exactly what he meant. Hilary and Alan, in her experience, were clueless and vague and not quite with it, but she would never have described them as innocent. They were too carnal. Too tough.

“I wanted to take the kids over to Hawkington, back to that counselor, to sort things out. They sure didn’t want to, and my wife was so upset she couldn’t even talk about it. The stuffed-animals thing made Hilary so mad she ran away. And she’s kept running away, off and on, ever since.” He kept looking over at the kitchen counter, avoiding her eyes, which she took to be a show of emotion until he cleared his throat and said, “I wouldn’t mind some water.”

She guessed this was where Hilary had learned her manners. But as she got him a glass, she thought of a question she wanted to ask. It wasn’t about Alan; she could picture his side of things pretty clearly, and anyway he’d never interested her that much. She looked at Halverson and said, “What can you tell me about Joshua?”

The silence following this question grew so long that it was as if he might not have heard it. He just sat there staring into space, the glass, now empty, balanced on his right knee. He had Hilary’s same intransigence, or she had his.

“Joshua,” he finally said.

Anne was getting annoyed. “She writes to him,” she prompted. “Postcards. She gives them to women at train stations and asks them to mail them.”

Again he was mute. To stop herself from drumming her fingers, she looked down and clasped her hands together. Glancing back up, she saw tears shimmering in his eyes. “What?” she said.

Halverson swallowed, his jaw clenched. “He was in the car too. Six he was, at the time. I guess he’d be around twelve now. I didn’t know that, about the postcards. Is that true? It breaks my heart.”

She believed him.

After a while, he composed himself and went into the bedroom to pack up Hilary’s and Alan’s belongings. Anne sat in the living room, not sure what to do.

Finally he emerged, listing to the left with a duffel bag. He set it on the floor by the door and held out his hand. “On behalf of my family,” he said, “I thank you for everything you’ve done.”

“Wait a minute,” Anne said. “Can I have your contact information?”

He looked at her blankly.

“Your address and phone number,” she said. “So I can get in touch with Hilary.”

His eyes skidded away from hers, around the apartment, then at the door, weighing his options. For the first time, his ordinary-guyness — plaid shirt, khaki pants, tidy haircut — started to look ominous in its very neatness. “I don’t know about that, miss,” he said. “You see, it would just encourage Hilary to think about coming back here. And she’s got to give up on that. She’s got to accept that being with her family is the right thing. It’s not just about her and Alan. It’s about that little baby.”

That bit about the baby was, Anne thought, what a certain kind of person would consider a trump card in an argument. She moved between him and the door. “They lived here for almost six months,” she said, and stopped herself from adding, they’re my family too. She hadn’t realized until the words nearly came out that she felt this way, and she was momentarily shocked into silence. But it was true.

Instead she — what else? — acted a part. She moved into his territory by making herself a substitute parent, a concerned citizen, older and more tired and folksy than she really was. “I did a lot for those kids,” she said. “I fed them and gave them a roof over their heads. I gave up my own bed. I don’t think it’s a lot to ask, Mr. Halverson, considering everything I’ve done.”

He put his hands on his hips, appraising her, then relented. “All righty,” he said. “You got a pen?”

She watched him write down the address — a rural route upstate — and phone number. It occurred to her that he could be making it all up, like she gave out fake numbers to guys in bars. Hilary was his niece, after all; lying probably ran in the family, as it did in her own.

She took the piece of paper out of his hand. “I’ll be calling to check in,” she said.

Halverson’s eyes grew steely. “I’d rather you didn’t,” he said.

He had taken all their clothes and shoes, Alan’s barbells, Hilary’s magazines, and the tiny apartment yawned with emptiness. She paced for a while in her living room, distracted and confused, until an image came to her — as vivid as a visitation — of her mother sitting hunched in a white-carpeted living room, picking at her nails. Crying in powerless grief.

This thought ought to have softened and saddened her, but instead it made her hard. For the rest of the day, her mission was to remove all traces of the past six months. She rearranged the furniture, cleaned out the refrigerator, changed the sheets, moved the bed against the far wall, filled three enormous Hefty bags with garbage and lugged them down to the street. By then it was nine o’clock and she was so tired that she tripped on the stairs going back up to the apartment. She sat there on the dirty landing and shuddered with tears. She let herself cry to the count of ten, then stood up and went inside.

So this was how it ended, she thought. It wasn’t what she’d expected.

She could have gone up there to make sure they were all right. It wasn’t out of the realm of possibility. But she didn’t. She was sure that Halverson, notwithstanding his air of domination and control, would take good care of the baby-to-be. She pictured a nursery — Hilary’s old room? — with a crib, pastel wallpaper, teddy bears. She doubted Hilary would get in touch when the baby was born. Anne wouldn’t have, if she were Hilary.

Anne didn’t believe in fate or the universe sending you signals and signs. She believed in making your own luck. So the day after Halverson’s visit, she put on a low-cut top, had a date with a director, and left with the names of three theater companies that were about to go on the road. And systematically she made dates with men in those companies until she had an offer to travel to Scotland on a festival tour. By Friday she was packed and at the airport, proud of herself for having taken charge. Of Alan and Hilary, she would have said, had there been anyone in her life to ask, that she could barely remember their names.

It was the first time she’d ever been to Europe, and she hadn’t been on a plane in over a decade. The security arrangements astounded her; she remembered as a child breezing through airports only minutes before departure, but that was over now. On board, she sat next to a sophisticated, sarcastic actress named Elizabeth who spent the whole flight gossiping about other members of the troupe, explaining which was a sex addict, an anorexic, an adulterer. Anne found all this helpful in terms of navigating the vipers’ nest that a group of actors often amounted to, and she had no problem with the calculating, temporary alliance being offered to her. But she wasn’t interested in sharing stories of her own. So when her seatmate began to press her, at first gently, then more forcefully, for details of her life, she held back. To win her confidence Elizabeth told a long story, maybe true, maybe false, about her affair with a married man, followed by depression, alcohol abuse, heroin, rehab, and “a current infatuation with coke and my nicotine patch.” It was all designed to bring out Anne’s own confession. In this kind of conversation, you had to give up something.

“Where did you grow up?” Elizabeth persisted, digging.

“On a farm,” Anne said. “In upstate New York.”

“You on a farm? I can’t even picture it.”

Anne nodded, gazing through the part in the curtain that showed a slice of first class. “I looked after the chickens.”

“Now I’m imagining you in pigtails, collecting eggs and putting them in a straw basket.”

“I used to gather the chickens for slaughter,” Anne said, calling up stories Hilary and Alan had told her. “I picked them up and held them in my arms to calm them down. I could feel their little hearts beating like crazy. They’d run away when they saw me coming. But I always caught them. I’d grab them by the legs and turn them upside down so the blood drained to their heads and they’d go limp. Then we killed them.”

“I could never do that,” Elizabeth said.

Anne shrugged. “You get used to it.”

Edinburgh was gray, gothic, and awash with actors. She’d had no idea of the scope of the festival, which thickened the streets with hordes of people handing out leaflets for performances and plastering posters on walls. There were Norwegian dancers, Japanese mimes, performances in churches and street corners; it was a planet of actors, and God only knew if there were enough people around to actually attend the hundreds of shows. In the evening the sound of the crowds outside filtered through the walls of their hotel, and between the noise and her excitement Anne barely slept.

In the morning they held a quick dress rehearsal in the back room of the pub where they’d be performing. Though it was August, the weather was cold and the room unheated, and she shivered throughout the warm-up. Most of the others had performed the play for a solid month in Soho and she felt she wasn’t fitting in, a discordant note in the song they’d learned to sing without her. The awkwardness made her nervous, and the nervousness made her even more awkward.

She thought she saw them raising an eyebrow at the director, and Elizabeth abandoned her when it came time for lunch, briskly walking off with the male lead, Tony. Anne went back to the hotel, where they were sharing a room, for a short, furious cry. Then she wiped her tears and worked on her lines for an hour.

Though it was only early afternoon, it already felt like evening; not having slept the night before, she could feel dryness and exhaustion creasing her face, and regretted having come. Her nerves were jangled, raw. She blamed the director for not giving her enough time and guidance, and Elizabeth, that snake, for rattling her even before the first show. She’d done them a favor by stepping in at the last minute, and in return she was getting absolutely no gratitude whatsoever.

Working up this anger comforted her and helped her concentration, but she was still upset. She needed to calm down before the performance. She walked through the crowded streets looking for a day spa or a yoga center, but couldn’t find either one and settled for her third choice, a bar. She sat down and ordered a Scotch, on the when-in-Rome principle. The bartender asked her what kind she wanted, and she shrugged helplessly. “You tell me,” she said.

He smiled and poured her a glass. She took a dark, smoky sip. At the far end of the bar, a bunch of young Americans was tossing back pints and taking no notice of her. Anne sighed and took another sip as a man slid onto the stool next to her and ordered a drink. A few more people filtered in, and when she went to the bathroom and came back, she saw a few heads turning to watch her.

“Buy you another?” the man next to her said. He was slender and dark-haired, wearing a lot of rings. His accent sounded Spanish or Portuguese.

“Okay,” she said. “Just one.”

When it came, she raised it in a gesture of thanks, and he smiled and pointed at his chest. “Sergio.”

“Millicent,” she said.

“Milly? What a sweet name.”

“Yeah, whatever,” she said, rolling her eyes. Already, she was close to having what she wanted and needed — a fleeting moment of attention, her presence in the world affirmed. She slid off the stool and stood.

Sergio touched her hand gently. “I’m sorry if I have offended you,” he said, knitting his eyebrows together charmingly. “I am a goofball at times.”

“A goofball?” It was such an unexpected word that she laughed, and he did too, showing large, white teeth. There was a mole on the side of his mouth, light brown and slightly raised, like a bread crumb stuck there.

“This is what my friends tell me, yes.”

“And where are these friends of yours? Spain?”

“I am from Lisbon originally, but right now I live in London. I work in telecommunications. I am here on business for a few days. Now you know everything about me. And you, Millicent?”

“I’m a teacher,” she said. “Taking some drama students on a field trip.”

“And where are your students now, Millicent?”

She shrugged. “I didn’t say I was a good teacher,” she said.

He laughed, shaking his head. “You are very intriguing.”

“No, I’m not, but thank you anyway. I should go. Thank you for the drink.” She turned away, only to feel his hand on her wrist, more forcefully this time.

“Can I persuade you to stay a little longer? I am sure your students are having a good time, wherever they are.”

“Sorry,” she said. “I have to go.”

She grabbed her bag and walked out with a surge of adrenaline that was buoyant, clarifying. When he caught up with her outside and tugged on her arm, she wasn’t surprised; she just sped up to try to evade him. He kept alongside her, edging her to the left, and within a few steps they were in a cobblestoned alley, her back against the wall, his weight pressed against her shoulder. Though the streets were crowded, the alley was narrow and shaded and the tourists too distracted, she knew, to glance sideways. His hand was under her sweater, his rings cold against her skin. His mouth was on her neck. She let him lean close, tilting back her neck and nudging his legs open with her knee, then slammed it against his crotch, hard.

“Fucking bitch,” he said, staggering backward, with a certain admiration in his rage. They faced each other and there was a moment when she could have run but didn’t want to. She was ready. When she reached out as if to brush that crumb off his face, he slapped her hard across the cheek and her ears rang and blood poured hot and thin from her nose. The taste of warm metal. He came up to her again and she hooked her ankle around his, tripping him onto the cobblestones, then pulled pepper spray out of her pocket and gave him a dose in the eyes. As he moaned and writhed on the ground, she ran away.

Back at the hotel she took a long, hot shower and studied the redness on her right cheek. Toweling off, she threw up her drinks. There were scratches on her neck and back.

When she got to the pub everybody stared, and Elizabeth immediately cornered her in the restroom. “Are you okay? What happened?”

“I don’t want to talk about it,” she said.

That evening she was brilliant. She could feel the group’s energy shifting as everyone responded to this new Anne, completely different from the stiff, insecure outsider at the dress rehearsal. During those two weeks in Edinburgh, she never once faltered. The other actors praised her, befriended her, and bought her drinks. Every once in a while someone would ask her to explain what had happened that afternoon — especially once the bruises started showing — but she just shook her head.

What fueled her wasn’t the injury but the ownership of a story that was a mystery to everyone else. The refusal to explain. The secret high that came from thinking none of them knew her at all.