TRESPASSES

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They drove out of town around midnight—Harry and Delphine in the front seat and Eileen and Lauren in the back. The sky was clear and the snow had slid off the trees but had not melted underneath them or on the rocks that jutted out beside the road. Harry stopped the car by a bridge.

“This’ll do.”

“Somebody might see us stopped here,” Eileen said. “They might stop to check out what we’re up to.”

He started to drive again. They turned onto the first little country road, where they all got out of the car and walked carefully down the bank, just a short way, among black lacy cedars. There was a slight crackle to the snow, though the ground underneath was soft and mucky. Lauren was still wearing her pajamas under her coat, but Eileen had made her put on her boots.

“Okay here?” Eileen said.

Harry said, “It’s not very far off the road.”

“It’s far enough.”

This was the year after Harry had quit his job on a news-magazine because he was burned out. He had bought the weekly newspaper in this small town which he remembered from his childhood. His family used to have a summer place on one of the little lakes around here, and he remembered drinking his first beer in the hotel on the main street. He and Eileen and Lauren went there for dinner on their first Sunday night in town.

But the bar was closed. Harry and Eileen had to drink water.

“How come?” said Eileen.

Harry raised his eyebrows at the hotel owner, who was also their waiter.

“Sunday?” he said.

“No license.” The owner had a thick—and, it seemed, disdainful—accent. He wore a shirt and tie, a cardigan, and trousers that looked as if they had grown together—all soft, rumpled, fuzzy, like an outer skin that was flaky and graying as his real skin must be underneath.

“Change from the old days,” said Harry, and when the man did not reply he went on to order roast beef all round.

“Friendly,” Eileen said.

“European,” said Harry. “It’s cultural. They don’t feel obliged to smile all the time.” He pointed out things in the dining room that were just the same—the high ceiling, the slowly rotating fan, even a murky oil painting showing a hunting dog with a rusty-feathered bird in its mouth.

In came some other diners. A family party. Little girls in patent shoes and scratchy frills, a toddling baby, a teenaged boy in a suit, half-dead with embarrassment, various parents and parents of parents—a skinny and distracted old man and an old woman flopped sideways in a wheelchair and wearing a corsage. Any one of the women in their flowery dresses would have made about four of Eileen.

“Wedding anniversary,” Harry whispered.

On the way out he stopped to introduce himself and his family, to tell them that he was the new fellow at the paper, and to offer his congratulations. He hoped they wouldn’t mind if he took down their names. Harry was a broad-faced, boyish-looking man with a tanned skin and shining light-brown hair. His glow of well-being and general appreciation spread around the table—though not perhaps to the teenaged boy or the old couple. He asked how long those two had been married and was told sixty-five years.

“Sixty-five years,” cried Harry, reeling at the thought. He asked if he might kiss the bride and did, touching his lips to the long flap of her ear as she moved her head aside.

“Now you have to kiss the groom,” he said to Eileen, who smiled tightly and pecked the old man on the top of his head.

Harry asked the recipe for a happy marriage.

“Momma can’t talk,” said one of the big women. “But let me ask Daddy.” She shouted in her father’s ear, “Your advice for a happy marriage?”

He wrinkled up his face roguishly.

“All-eeze keep a foot on er neck.”

All the grown-ups laughed, and Harry said, “Okay. I’ll just put in the paper that you always made sure to get your wife’s agreement.”

Outside, Eileen said, “How do they manage to get that fat? I don’t understand it. You’d have to eat day and night to get that fat.”

“Strange,” said Harry.

“Those were canned green beans,” she said. “In August. Isn’t that when green beans are ripe? And out here in the middle of the country, where they are supposed to grow things?”

“Stranger than strange,” he said happily.

Almost immediately changes came to the hotel. In the former dining room there was a false ceiling put in—paperboard squares supported by strips of metal. The big round tables were replaced by small square tables, and the heavy wooden chairs by light metal chairs with maroon plastic–covered seats. Because of the lowered ceiling, the windows had to be reduced to squat rectangles. A neon sign in one of them said WELCOME COFFEE SHOP.

The owner, whose name was Mr. Palagian, never smiled or said a word more than he could help to anybody, in spite of the sign.

Just the same, the coffee shop filled up with customers at noon, or in the later hours of the afternoon. The customers were high school students, mostly from Grade Nine to Grade Eleven. Also some of the older students from the grade school. The great attraction of the place was that anybody could smoke there. Not that you could buy cigarettes if you looked to be under sixteen. Mr. Palagian was strict about that. Not you, he would say, in his thick, dreary voice. Not you.

By this time he had hired a woman to work for him, and if somebody who was too young tried buying cigarettes from her she would laugh.

“Who are you kidding, baby face.”

But someone who was sixteen or over could collect the money from those who were younger and buy a dozen packs.

Letter of the law, Harry said.

Harry stopped eating his lunch there—it was too noisy—but he still came in for breakfast. He was hoping that one day Mr. Palagian would thaw out and tell the story of his life. Harry kept a file full of ideas for books and was always on the lookout for life stories. Someone like Mr. Palagian—or even that fat tough-talking waitress, he said—could be harboring a contemporary tragedy or adventure which would make a best seller.

The thing about life, Harry had told Lauren, was to live in the world with interest. To keep your eyes open and see the possibilities—see the humanity—in everybody you met. To be aware. If he had anything at all to teach her it was that. Be aware.

Lauren made her own breakfast, usually cereal with maple syrup instead of milk. Eileen took her coffee back to bed and drank it slowly. She didn’t want to talk. She had to get herself in gear to face the day, working in the newspaper office. When she got herself sufficiently in gear—sometime after Lauren went off to school—she got out of bed and had a shower and got dressed in one of her casually provocative outfits. As the fall wore on this was usually a bulky sweater and a short leather skirt and brightly colored tights. Like Mr. Palagian, Eileen managed easily to look different from anybody else in that town, but unlike him she was beautiful, with her cropped black hair and her thin gold earrings like exclamation points, and her faintly mauve eyelids. Her manner in the newspaper office was crisp and her expression remote, but this was broken by strategic, vivid smiles.

They had rented a house at the edge of town. Just beyond their backyard began a vacationland wilderness of rocky knobs and granite slopes, cedar bogs, small lakes, and a transitional forest of poplars, soft maples, tamarack, and spruce. Harry loved it. He said that they might wake up one morning and look out at a moose in the backyard. Lauren came home after school when the sun was already getting low in the sky and the middling warmth of the autumn day was turning out to be a fraud. The house was chilly and smelled of last night’s dinner, of stale coffee grounds and the garbage which it was her job to take out. Harry was making a compost heap—next year he meant to have a vegetable garden. Lauren carried the pail of peelings, apple cores, coffee grounds, leftovers, out to the edge of the woods, from which a moose or a bear might appear. The poplar leaves had turned yellow, the tamaracks held furry orange spikes up against the dark evergreens. She dumped the garbage, and shovelled dirt and grass cuttings over it, the way that Harry had shown her.

Her life was a lot different now from the way it had been just a few weeks ago, when she and Harry and Eileen were driving to one of the lakes to swim in the hot afternoons. Then later in the evenings, she and Harry had gone on adventure walks around the town, while Eileen sanded and painted and wall-papered the house, claiming she could do that faster and better on her own. All that she had wanted Harry to do then was to get all his boxes of papers and his filing cabinet and desk into a ratty little room in the basement, out of her way. Lauren had helped him.

One cardboard box she picked up was oddly light and it seemed to hold something soft, not like paper, more like cloth or yarn. Just as she said, “What’s this?” Harry saw her holding it and he said, “Hey.” Then he said, “Oh God.”

He took the box out of her hands and put it into a drawer of the filing cabinet, which he banged shut. “Oh God,” he said again.

He had hardly ever spoken to her in such a rough and exasperated way. He looked around as if there might have been somebody watching them and clapped his hands on his trousers.

“Sorry,” he said. “I wasn’t expecting you to pick that up.” He put his elbows on the top of the filing cabinet and leaned his forehead on his hands.

“Now,” he said. “Now, Lauren. I could make up some kind of a lie to tell you, but I am going to tell you the truth. Because I believe that children should be told the truth. At least by the time they’re your age, they should be. But in this case it has got to be a secret. Okay?”

Lauren said, “Okay.” Something made her wish, already, that he wouldn’t do this.

“There’s ashes in there,” Harry said. His voice dropped in a peculiar way when he said ashes. “Not ordinary ashes. Cremated ashes of a baby. This baby died before you were born. Okay? Sit down.”

She sat on a pile of hardcover notebooks that contained Harry’s writing. He raised his head and looked at her.

“See—what I’m telling you is very upsetting to Eileen and that’s why it has got to be a secret. That’s why you never were told about it, because Eileen cannot stand to be reminded. So now you understand?”

She said what she had to say. Yes.

“Okay now—what happened was, we had this baby before we had you. A baby girl, and when the baby was just very tiny Eileen got pregnant. And this was a terrible shock to her because she was just finding out what a terrible lot of work a new baby is and here she was, not getting any sleep and throwing up because she had morning sickness. It wasn’t just morning, it was morning noon and night sickness, and she just did not know how she could face it. Being pregnant. So one night when she was just beside herself she somehow got the idea that she had to get out. And she got in the car and the baby in with her in its cot and it was after dark, raining, and she was driving too fast and she missed a curve. So. The baby wasn’t fixed in properly and it bounced out of the cot. And Eileen had broken ribs and concussion and it looked for a while as if we were going to lose both babies.”

He took a deep breath.

“I mean, we had lost the one already. When it bounced out of its cot it was killed. But we didn’t lose the one Eileen was carrying. Because. That was you. You understand? You.”

Lauren nodded, minimally.

“So the reason we didn’t tell you this—besides the state of Eileen’s emotions—is that it might not make you feel very welcome. Not in the first circumstances. But you just have to believe me you were. Oh, Lauren. You were. You are.”

He removed his arm from the filing cabinet and came and hugged her. He smelled of sweat and the wine he and Eileen had drunk at dinner and Lauren felt very uncomfortable and embarrassed. The story didn’t upset her, although the ashes were a little ghoulish. But she took his word for it that it did upset Eileen.

“Is that what you have the fights about?” she said, in an offhand way, and he let her go.

“The fights,” he said sadly. “I suppose there could be something about that underlying. Underlying her hysteria. You know I feel bad about all that stuff. I really do.”

When they went out on their walks he occasionally asked her if she was worried, or sad, about what he had told her. She said, “No,” in a firm, rather impatient, voice, and he said, “Good.”

Every street had a curiosity—the Victorian mansion (now a nursing home), the brick tower that was all that was left of a broom factory, the graveyard going back to 1842. And for a couple of days there was a fall fair. They watched trucks ploughing one by one through the dirt, pulling a platform loaded with cement blocks which slipped forward, causing the trucks to fishtail, and halt and have their distance measured. Harry and Lauren each picked a truck to cheer for.

Now it seemed to Lauren that all of that time had a false glow to it, a reckless silly sort of enthusiasm, that did not take any account of the weight of dailiness, or reality, that she had to carry around once school began and the paper started coming out and the weather changed. A bear or a moose was a real wild animal brooding over its own necessities—it was not some kind of thrill. And she would not now jump up and down and scream as she had done at the fairgrounds, cheering for her truck. Somebody from school might see her and think she was a freak.

Which was close to what they thought anyway.

Her isolation at school was based on knowledge and experience, which, as she half knew, could look like innocence and priggishness. The things that were wicked mysteries to others were not so to her and she did not know how to pretend about them. And that was what separated her, just as much as knowing how to pronounce L’Anse aux Meadows and having read The Lord of the Rings. She had drunk half a bottle of beer when she was five and puffed on a joint when she was six, though she had not liked either one. She sometimes had a little wine at dinner, and she liked that all right. She knew about oral sex and all methods of birth control and what homosexuals did. She had regularly seen Harry and Eileen naked, also a party of their friends naked around a campfire in the woods. On that same holiday she had sneaked out with other children to watch fathers slipping by sly agreement into the tents of mothers who were not their wives. One of the boys had suggested sex to her and she had agreed, but he could not make any progress and they became cross with each other and later she hated the sight of him.

This was all a burden to her here—it gave her a sense of embarrassment and peculiar sadness, even of deprivation. And there wasn’t much she could do except remember, at school, to call Harry and Eileen Dad and Mom. That seemed to make them larger, but not so sharp. Their tense outlines were slightly blurred when they were spoken of in this way, their personalities slightly glossed over. Face-to-face with them, she had no technique for making this happen. She couldn’t even acknowledge that it might be a comfort.

Some girls in Lauren’s class, finding the vicinity of the coffee shop irresistible but not being brave enough to go in, would enter the hotel lobby and make their way to the Ladies Room. There they would spend a quarter or a half hour fixing their own and each other’s hair in different styles, putting on lipstick that they might have stolen from Stedmans, sniffing each other’s necks and wrists, which they had sprayed with all the free trial perfumes in the drugstore.

When they asked Lauren to go with them she suspected some sort of trick, but agreed anyway, partly because she so disliked going home alone in the ever-shortening afternoons to the house on the edge of the forest.

As soon as they were inside the lobby a couple of these girls took hold of her and pushed her up to the desk, where the woman from the restaurant was seated on a high stool, working out some figures on a calculator.

This woman’s name—Lauren already knew it from Harry— was Delphine. She had long fine hair that might be whitish blond or might be really white, because she was not young. She must often have to shake that hair back out of her face, as she did now. Her eyes, behind dark-rimmed glasses, were hooded by purple lids. Her face was broad, like her body, pale and smooth. But there was nothing indolent about her. Her eyes, now lifted, were a light flat blue, and she looked from one girl to another as if no contemptible behavior of theirs would surprise her.

“This is her,” the girls said.

The woman—Delphine—now looked at Lauren. She said, “Lauren? You sure?”

Lauren, bewildered, said yes.

“Well, I asked them was there anybody at their school called Lauren,” Delphine said—referring to the other girls as if they were already at a distance, shut out of her conversation with Lauren. “I asked them because of something that was found in here. Somebody must’ve dropped it in the coffee shop.”

She opened a drawer and lifted out a gold chain. Dangling from the chain were the letters that spelled LAUREN.

Lauren shook her head.

“Not yours?” said Delphine. “Too bad. I already asked the kids in high school. So I guess I’ll just have to keep it around. Somebody might come back looking for it.”

Lauren said, “You could put an ad in my dad’s paper.” She did not realize that she should have said just “the paper” until the next day, when she passed a couple of girls in the school hallway and heard a mincing voice say my dad’s paper.

“I could,” said Delphine. “But then I might get all kinds of people coming in and saying it’s theirs. Lying about what their name was, even. It’s gold.”

“But they couldn’t wear it,” Lauren pointed out, “if it wasn’t their real name.”

“Maybe not. But I wouldn’t put it past them to claim it anyway.”

The other girls had started for the Ladies.

“Hey you,” Delphine called after them. “That’s out of bounds.”

They turned around, surprised.

“How come?”

“Because it’s out of bounds, that’s how come. You can go and fool around someplace else.”

“You never stopped us going in there before.”

“Before was before and now is now.”

“It’s supposed to be public.”

“It is not,” said Delphine. “The one in the town hall is public. So get lost.”

“I wasn’t referring to you,” she said to Lauren, who was about to follow the others. “I’m sorry the chain wasn’t yours. You check back in a day or two. If nobody shows up to ask about it, I’ll figure, hey, it’s got your name on it, after all.”

Lauren came back the next day. She did not care about the chain at all, really—she could not imagine going around with your name hanging on your neck. She just wanted to have an errand to do, someplace to go. She could have gone to the newspaper office, but after hearing the way they said my dad’s paper, she didn’t want to do that.

She had decided not to go in if Mr. Palagian and not Delphine was behind the desk. But Delphine was right there, watering an ugly plant in the front window.

“Oh good,” Delphine said. “Nobody’s come and asked about it. Give it till the end of the week, I have a feeling it’s going to be yours yet. You can always come in, this time of day. I don’t work the coffee shop in the afternoons. If I’m not in the lobby you just ring the bell, I’ll be around somewhere.”

Lauren said, “Okay,” and turned to go.

“You feel like sitting down a minute? I was thinking I’d get a cup of tea. Do you ever drink tea? Are you allowed to? Would you rather have a soft drink?”

“Lemon-lime,” said Lauren. “Please.”

“In a glass? Would you like a glass? Ice?”

“It’s okay just the way it is,” said Lauren. “Thank you.”

Delphine brought a glass anyway, with ice. “It didn’t seem quite cooled off enough to me,” she said. She asked Lauren where she would rather sit—in one of the worn-down old leather chairs by the window or on a high stool behind the desk. Lauren picked the stool, and Delphine sat on the other stool.

“Now, you want to tell me what you learned in school today?”

Lauren said, “Well—”

Delphine’s wide face broke into a smile.

“I just asked you that for a joke. I used to hate it, people asking me that. For one thing, I could never remember anything I learned that day. And for another thing, I could do without talking about school when I wasn’t at it. So we skip that.”

Lauren was not surprised by this woman’s evident wish to be friends. She had been brought up to believe that children and adults could be on equal terms with each other, though she had noticed that many adults did not understand this and it was as well not to press the point. She saw that Delphine was a little nervous. That was why she kept talking without a break, and laughing at odd moments, and why she resorted to the maneuver of reaching into the drawer and pulling out a chocolate bar.

“Just a little treat with your drink. Got to make it worthwhile to come and see me again, eh?”

Lauren was embarrassed on the woman’s behalf, though glad to accept the chocolate bar. She never got candy at home.

“You don’t have to bribe me to come and see you,” she said. “I’d like to.”

“Oh-ho. So I don’t, don’t I? You’re quite the kid. Okay, then give me that back.”

She grabbed for the chocolate bar, and Lauren ducked to protect it. Now she laughed too.

“I meant next time. Next time you don’t have to bribe me.”

“One bribe is okay, though. That it?”

“I like to have something to do,” Lauren said. “Not just go on home.”

“Don’t you go visit your friends?”

“I don’t really have any. I only started this school in September.”

“Well. If that bunch that was coming in here is any sample of what you’ve got to pick from, I’d say you’re better off. How do you like this town?”

“It’s small. Some things are nice.”

“It’s a dump. They’re all dumps. I have experienced so many dumps in my time you’d think the rats would have ate off my nose by now.” She tapped her fingers up and down her nose. Her nails matched her eyelids. “Still there,” she said doubtfully.

It’s a dump. Delphine said things like that. She spoke vehemently—she did not discuss but stated, and her judgments were severe and capricious. She spoke about herself—her tastes, her physical workings—as about a monumental mystery, something unique and final.

She had an allergy to beets. If even a drop of beet juice made its way down her throat, her tissues would swell up and she would have to go to the hospital, she would need an emergency operation so that she could breathe.

“How’s it with you? You got any allergies? No? Good.”

She believed a woman should keep her hands nice, no matter what kind of work she had to do. She liked to wear inky-blue or plum fingernail polish. And she liked to wear earrings, big and clattery ones, even at her work. She had no use for the little button kind.

She was not afraid of snakes, but she had a weird feeling about cats. She thought that a cat must have come and lain on top of her when she was a baby, being attracted to the smell of milk.

“So what about you?” she said to Lauren. “What are you scared of? What’s your favorite color? Did you ever walk in your sleep? Do you get a tan or a sunburn? Does your hair grow fast or slow?”

It was not as if Lauren was unused to somebody being interested in her. Harry and Eileen were interested—particularly Harry—in her thoughts and opinions and what she felt about things. Sometimes this interest got on her nerves. But she had never realized that there could be all these other things, arbitrary facts, that could seem delightfully important. And she never got the feeling—as she did at home—that there was any other question behind Delphine’s questions, never the feeling that if she didn’t watch out she would be pried open.

Delphine taught her jokes. She said she knew hundreds of jokes, but she would only tell Lauren the ones that were fit. Harry would not have agreed that the jokes about people from Newfoundland (Newfies) were fit, but Lauren laughed obligingly.

She told Harry and Eileen that she was going to a friend’s place, after school. That was not really a lie. They seemed pleased. But because of them she did not take the gold chain with her name when Delphine said she could. She pretended to be concerned that somebody it belonged to might still come looking for it.

Delphine knew Harry, she brought him his breakfast in the coffee shop, and she could have mentioned Lauren’s visits to him, but apparently she didn’t.

She sometimes put up a sign—Ring Bell for Service—and took Lauren with her into other parts of the hotel. Guests did stay there once in a while, and their beds had to be made up, their toilets and sinks scrubbed, their floors vacuumed. Lauren was not allowed to help. “Just sit there and talk to me,” Delphine said. “It’s lonesome kind of work.”

But she was the one who talked. She talked about her life without getting it in any kind of order. Characters appeared and disappeared and Lauren was supposed to know who they were without asking. People called Mr. and Mrs. were good bosses. Other bosses were Old Sowbelly, Old Horse’s Arse (Don’t repeat my language), and they were terrible. Delphine had worked in hospitals (As a nurse? Are you kidding?) and in tobacco fields and in okay restaurants and in dives and in a lumber camp where she cooked and in a bus depot where she cleaned and saw things too gross to talk about and in an all-night convenience store where she was held up and quit.

Sometimes she was palling around with Lorraine and sometimes Phyl. Phyl had a way of borrowing your things without asking—she borrowed Delphine’s blouse and wore it to a dance and sweated so much she rotted out the underarms. Lorraine had graduated from high school but she made a big mistake when she married the lamebrain she did and now she was surely sorry.

Delphine could have got married. Some men she had gone out with had done well, some had turned into bums, some she had no idea what had happened to them. She was fond of a boy named Tommy Kilbride but he was a Catholic.

“You probably don’t know what that means for a woman.”

“It means you can’t use birth control,” Lauren said. “Eileen was a Catholic, but she quit because she didn’t agree. Eileen my mom.”

“Your mom wouldn’t have to worry anyway, the way it turned out.”

Lauren did not understand. Then she thought Delphine must be talking about her—Lauren—being an only child. She must think that Harry and Eileen would have liked to have more children after they had her but that Eileen had not been able to have them. As far as Lauren knew, that wasn’t the case.

She said, “They could’ve had more if they’d wanted. After they had me.”

“That what you think, eh?” Delphine said jokingly. “Maybe they couldn’t have any. Could have adopted you.”

“No. They didn’t. I know they didn’t.” Lauren was on the verge of telling about what happened when Eileen was pregnant, but she held back because Harry had made so much of its being a secret. She was superstitious about breaking a promise, though she had noticed that adults often didn’t mind breaking theirs.

“Don’t look so serious,” Delphine said. She took Lauren’s face in her hands and tapped her blackberry fingernails on her cheeks. “I’m only kidding.”

The dryer in the hotel laundry was on the blink, Delphine had to hang up the wet sheets and towels, and because it was raining the best place to do that was in the old livery stable. Lauren helped carry the baskets piled with white linen across the little gravelled yard behind the hotel and into the empty stone barn. A cement floor had been put in there, but still a smell seeped through from the earth beneath, or maybe out of the stone-and-rubble walls. Damp dirt, horse hide, rich hints of piss and leather. The space was empty except for the clotheslines and a few broken chairs and bureaus. Their steps echoed.

“Try calling your name,” said Delphine.

Lauren called, “Del-phee-een.”

Your name. What are you up to?”

“It’s better for the echo,” said Lauren, and called again, “Del-phee-een.”

“I don’t like my name,” said Delphine. “Nobody likes their own name.”

“I don’t not like mine.”

“Lauren’s nice. It’s a nice name. They picked a nice name for you.”

Delphine had disappeared behind the sheet she was pinning to the clothesline. Lauren wandered around whistling.

“It’s singing that really sounds good in here,” Delphine said. “Sing your favorite song.”

Lauren could not think of a song that was her favorite. That seemed to amaze Delphine, just as she had been amazed when she found out that Lauren did not know any jokes.

“I have loads,” she said. And she began to sing.

“Moon River, wider than a mile—”

That was a song Harry sang sometimes, always making fun of the song, or himself. Delphine’s way of singing it was quite different. Lauren felt the calm sorrow of Delphine’s voice pulling her towards the wavering white sheets. The sheets themselves seemed as if they would dissolve around her—no, around her and Delphine—creating a feeling of acute sweetness. Delphine’s singing was like an embrace, wide-open, that you could rush into. At the same time, its loose emotion gave Lauren a shiver in her stomach, a distant threat of being sick.

“Waiting round the bend
My huckleberry friend—”

 

Lauren interrupted by catching up a chair with the seat out and scraping its leg along the floor.

“Something I’ve been meaning to ask you,” Lauren said resolutely to Harry and Eileen, at the dinner table. “Is there any sort of chance I could be adopted?”

“Where did you get that idea?” said Eileen.

Harry stopped eating, raised his eyebrows warningly at Lauren, then began to joke. “If we were going to adopt a kid,” he said, “do you think we’d get one that asked so many nosey questions?”

Eileen stood up, fiddling with her skirt zipper. The skirt fell down, and then she rolled down her tights and underpants.

“Look here,” she said. “That ought to tell you.”

Her stomach, which looked flat when she was dressed, now showed a slight fullness and sag. Its surface, still lightly tanned down to the bikini mark, was streaked with some dead-white tracks that glistened in the kitchen light. Lauren had seen these before but had thought nothing of them—they had just seemed to be a part of Eileen’s particular body, like the twin moles on her collarbone.

“That is from the skin stretching,” Eileen said. “I carried you way out in front.” She held her hand an impossible distance in front of her body. “So now are you convinced?”

Harry put his head against Eileen, nuzzled her bare stomach. Then he pulled back and spoke to Lauren.

“In case you’re wondering why we didn’t have any more, the answer is that you are the only kid we need. You’re smart and good-looking and you have a sense of humor. How could we be sure we’d get another that good? Plus, we are not your average family. We like to move around. Try things, be flexible. We have got one kid who is perfect and adaptable. No need to push our luck.”

His face, which Eileen could not see, was directing at Lauren a look far more serious than his words. A continued warning, mixed with disappointment and surprise.

If Eileen had not been there, Lauren would have questioned him. What if they had lost both babies, instead of just the one? What if she herself had never been inside Eileen and was not responsible for those tracks on her stomach? How could she be sure that they had not got her as a replacement? If there was one big thing she hadn’t known about, why could there not be another?

This notion was unsettling, but it had a distant charm.

The next time Lauren came into the hotel lobby after school, she was coughing.

“Come on upstairs,” Delphine said. “I got some good stuff for that.”

Just as she was putting out the Ring Bell for Service sign Mr. Palagian entered the lobby from the coffee shop. On one foot he wore a shoe and on the other a slipper, slit open to accommodate a bandaged foot. Just about where his big toe must be there was a dried blood spot.

Lauren thought that Delphine would take the sign down when she saw Mr. Palagian, but she didn’t. All she said to him was, “You better change that bandage when you get a chance.”

Mr. Palagian nodded but did not look at her.

“I’ll be down in a bit,” she told him.

Her room was up on the third floor, under the eaves. Climbing and coughing, Lauren said, “What happened to his foot?”

“What foot?” said Delphine. “Could be somebody stepped on it, I guess. Maybe with the heel of their shoe, eh?”

The ceiling of her room sloped steeply on either side of a dormer window. There was a single bed, a sink, a chair, a bureau. On the chair a hot plate with a kettle on it. On the bureau a crowded array of makeup, combs and pills, a tin of tea bags and a tin of hot chocolate powder. The bedspread was of thin tan-and-white striped seersucker, like the ones on the guest beds.

“Not very fixed up, is it?” Delphine said. “I don’t spend a lot of time here.” She filled the kettle at the sink and plugged in the hot plate, then yanked off the bedspread to remove a blanket. “Get out of that jacket,” she said. “Wrap yourself up warm in this.” She touched the radiator. “It takes all day for any heat to get up here.”

Lauren did as she was told. Two cups and two spoons were taken out of the top drawer, hot chocolate was measured from the tin. Delphine said, “I only make it with hot water. I guess you’re used to milk. I don’t take milk in tea or anything. I bring it up here, it just goes sour. I don’t have any refrigerator.”

“It’s fine with water,” said Lauren, though she had never drunk hot chocolate that way. She had a sudden wish to be at home, wrapped up on the sofa and watching TV.

“Well, don’t just stand there,” said Delphine, in a slightly irritated or nervous voice. “Sit down and get comfortable. The kettle won’t take long.”

Lauren sat on the edge of the bed. Suddenly Delphine turned around, grabbed her under the arms—causing her to start coughing again—and hauled her up so that she was sitting with her back against the wall and her feet sticking out over the floor. Her boots were pulled off, and Delphine quickly squeezed her feet, to see if her socks were wet.

No.

“Hey. I was going to get you something to fix that cough. Where’s my cough syrup?”

From the same top drawer came a bottle half-full of amber liquid. Delphine poured out a spoonful. “Open up,” she said. “Doesn’t taste so dreadful.”

Lauren, when she’d swallowed, said, “Is there whisky in it?”

Delphine peered at the bottle, which had no label.

“I don’t see where it says so. Can you see? Are your mommy and daddy going to have a fit if I give you a spoon of whisky for your cough?”

“Sometimes my dad makes me a toddy.”

“He does, does he?”

Now the kettle was boiling and the water was poured into the cups. Delphine stirred hurriedly, mashing the lumps, talking to them.

“Come on, you buggers. Come on, you.” Pretending to be jolly.

There was something wrong with Delphine today. She seemed too flustered and excited, maybe angry underneath. Also, she was way too big, too flouncy and glossy, for this room.

“You look around this place,” she said, “and I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking, wow, she must be poor. Why doesn’t she have more stuff? But I don’t accumulate stuff. For the very good reason that I’ve had too many experiences of having to pick up and move on. Just get settled, you find something happens and you have to move on. I save, though. People would be surprised what I’ve got in the bank.”

She gave Lauren her cup, and settled herself carefully at the head of the bed, the pillow at her back, her stockinged feet on the exposed sheet. Lauren had a particular feeling of disgust about feet in nylon stockings. Not about bare feet, or feet in socks, or feet in shoes, or feet in nylons covered up in shoes, just about feet in nylons out in the open, particularly touching any other cloth. This was just a private queer feeling—like the feeling she had about mushrooms, or cereal slopping around in milk.

“Just when you came in this afternoon I was feeling sad,” Delphine said. “I was thinking about a girl I used to know and thinking I should write her a letter if I knew where she was. Joyce was her name. I was thinking about what happened to her in her life.”

The weight of Delphine’s body made the mattress sag so that Lauren had trouble not sliding towards her. The effort that she was making not to bump against that body embarrassed her, and made her try to be particularly polite.

“When did you know her?” she said. “When you were young?”

Delphine laughed. “Yeah. When I was young. She was young too and she had to get out of her house and she was hanging around with this guy and she got caught. You know what I mean by that?”

Lauren said, “Pregnant.”

“Right. So she was just drifting along, she thought it might go ’way, maybe. Ha-ha. Like the flu. The guy she was with already had two kids with another woman he wasn’t married to but that was more or less his wife, and he was always thinking about going back to her. But before he got around to that he got busted. And also she did—Joyce did—because she was carrying stuff around for him. She had it packed into Tampax tubes, you know what they look like? You know what stuff I mean?”

“Yes,” said Lauren to both questions. “Sure. Dope.”

Delphine made a gurgling sound, swallowing her drink. “This is all top secret, you understand that?”

Not all the lumps of hot chocolate powder had got mashed up and dissolved, and Lauren did not want to mash them with the spoon that would still have the taste of the so-called cough syrup on it.

“She got off with a suspended sentence, so it wasn’t all a bad thing she was pregnant, that was what got her off. And what happened next, she got in with these Christians and they knew a doctor and wife that looked after girls when they had their babies and got the babies adopted right away. It was not quite on the up-and-up, they were getting money for these babies, but anyway it kept her clear of the social workers. So, she had her baby and never even saw it. All she knew was that it was a girl.”

Lauren looked around for a clock. There didn’t seem to be one. Delphine’s watch was up under the sleeve of her black sweater.

“So she got out of there and one thing and another happened to her and she didn’t give the baby a thought. She thought she’d get married and have some more kids. So, well, that didn’t happen. Not that she minded so much, given some of the people it didn’t happen with. She even had a couple of operations so it wouldn’t. You know what kind of operations?”

“Abortions,” Lauren said. “What time is it?”

“You are a kid that is not short of information,” Delphine said. “Yeah, that’s right. Abortions.” She pulled up her sleeve to look at her watch. “It isn’t five yet. I was just going to say that she started thinking about that little girl and wondering what became of her so she started investigating to find out. So it happened she got lucky and found those same people. The Christian people. She had to get a bit nasty with them but she got some information. She found out the names of the couple that took her.”

Lauren wriggled her way off the bed. Half tripping on the blanket, she set her cup on the bureau.

“I have to go now,” she said. She looked out the little window. “It’s snowing.”

“Is it? So what else is new? Don’t you want to know the rest?”

Lauren was putting on her boots, trying to do it in an absentminded way so that Delphine wouldn’t take much notice.

“The man was supposed to be working for this magazine, so she went there and they said he wasn’t there but they told her where he had went to. She didn’t know what name they gave her baby but that was another thing she was able to find out. You never know what you’ll find out till you try. You trying to run away on me?”

“I have to go. My stomach feels sick. I’ve got a cold.”

Lauren yanked at the jacket that Delphine had hung on the high hook on the back of the door. When she couldn’t get it down immediately, her eyes filled with tears.

“I don’t even know this person Joyce,” she said miserably.

Delphine shifted her feet to the floor, got up slowly from the bed, set her cup on the bureau.

“If your stomach feels sick you should lie down. You probably drank that too fast.”

“I just want my jacket.”

Delphine lifted the jacket down but held it too high. When Lauren grabbed at it she would not let go.

“What’s the matter?” she said. “You’re not crying, are you? I wouldn’t’ve took you for a crybaby. Okay. Okay. Here it is. I was just teasing you.”

Lauren got her sleeves in but knew she couldn’t manage the zipper. She stuck her hands in the pockets.

“Okay?” said Delphine. “You okay now? You still my friend?”

“Thank you for the hot chocolate.”

“Don’t walk too fast, you want your stomach to settle down.”

Delphine bent over. Lauren backed off, scared that the white hair, the silky flopping curtains of hair, were going to get in her mouth.

If you were old enough for your hair to be white, then it shouldn’t be long.

“I know you can keep a secret, I know you keep our visits and talks and everything a secret. You’ll understand later. You’re a wonderful little girl. There.”

She kissed Lauren’s head.

“You just don’t worry about anything,” she said.

Large flakes of snow were falling straight down, leaving on the sidewalks a fluffy coating that melted into black tracks where people walked, and then filled up again. The cars moved along cautiously, showing blurred yellow lights. Lauren looked around now and then to see if anybody was following her. She could not see very well because of the thickening snow and the failing light, but she did not think anybody was.

The feeling in her stomach was of both a swelling and a hollow. It seemed as if she might get rid of that just by eating the right sort of food, so when she got into the house she went straight to the kitchen cupboard and poured herself a bowl of the familiar breakfast cereal. There was no maple syrup left, but she found some corn syrup. She stood in the cold kitchen, eating without even having taken her boots and her outdoor clothing off, and looking out at the freshly whitened backyard. Snow made things visible, even with the kitchen light on. She saw herself reflected against the background of snowy yard and dark rocks capped with white, and evergreen branches drooping already under their white load.

She had hardly got the last spoonful into her mouth when she had to run to the bathroom and throw it all up—cornflakes as yet hardly altered, slime of syrup, slick strings of pale chocolate.

When her parents got home she was lying on the sofa, still in her boots and jacket, watching television.

Eileen pulled her outdoor things off and brought her a blanket and took her temperature—it was normal—then felt her stomach to see if it was hard, and made her bend her right knee up to her chest to see if that gave her a pain in her right side. Eileen always worried about appendicitis because she had once been at a party—the sort of party that went on for days—where a girl had died of a burst appendix, with everybody too stoned to realize that she was in any serious trouble. When she decided that Lauren’s appendix was not involved she went to get dinner, and Harry kept Lauren company.

“I think you’ve got schoolitis,” he said. “I used to get it myself. Only when I was a kid the cure for it hadn’t been invented. You know what the cure is? Lying on the couch and watching TV.”

Next morning Lauren said that she was still feeling sick, though it was not true. She refused breakfast, but as soon as Harry and Eileen were out of the house she got a large cinnamon bun, which she ate without warming it up while she watched television. She wiped her sticky fingers on the blanket that covered her, and tried to think about her future. She wanted to spend it right here, inside the house, on the sofa, but unless she could manufacture some genuine sickness she did not see how that would be possible.

The television news was over and one of the daily soap operas had come on. Here was a world she had been familiar with when she had bronchitis last spring, and had since forgotten all about. In spite of her desertion not much seemed to have changed. Most of the same characters appeared—in new circumstances, of course—and they had their same ways of behaving (noble, ruthless, sexy, sad) and their same looks into the distance and same unfinished sentences referring to accidents and secrets. She enjoyed watching them for a while, but then something that came into her mind began to worry her. Children and grown people too in these stories had often turned out to belong to quite different families from those they had always accepted as their own. Strangers who were sometimes crazy and dangerous had appeared out of the blue with their catastrophic claims and emotions, lives were turned upside down.

This might once have seemed to her an attractive possibility, but it didn’t any longer.

Harry and Eileen never locked the doors. Imagine that, Harry would say—we live in a place where you can just walk out and never lock your doors. Lauren got up now and locked them, back and front. Then she closed the curtains on all of the windows. It wasn’t snowing today, but there was no melting. The new snow already had a gray tinge to it, as if it had got old overnight.

There was no way that she could cover the little windows in the front door. There were three of them, shaped like teardrops, in a diagonal line. Eileen hated them. She had ripped off the wallpaper and painted the walls of this cheap house with unexpected colors—robin’s-egg blue, blackberry-rose, lemon yellow—she had taken up ugly carpets and sanded the floors, but there was nothing she could do about those dinky little windows.

Harry said that they weren’t so bad, that there was one for each of them, and just at the right height too, for each of them to look out. He named them Papa Bear, Mama Bear, Baby Bear.

When the soap opera ended and a man and woman began talking about indoor plants, Lauren fell into a light sleep which she hardly knew was a sleep. She knew that it must have been when she woke up from a dream of an animal, a wintry sort of gray weasel or skinny fox—she wasn’t sure what—watching the house in broad daylight from the backyard. In the dream somebody had told her that this animal was rabid, because it was not scared of humans or the houses where they lived.

The phone was ringing. She pulled the blanket over her head so she would not hear it. She was sure it was Delphine. Delphine wanting to know how she was, why she was hiding, what did she think about the story she had told her, when was she coming to the hotel?

It was really Eileen, checking on how Lauren was feeling and the state of her appendix. Eileen let the phone ring ten or fifteen times, then she ran from the newspaper office without putting on her coat and drove home. When she found the door locked she banged on it with her fist and rattled the knob. She pressed her face to the Mama Bear window and shouted Lauren’s name. She could hear the television. She ran around to the back door and banged and shouted again.

Lauren heard all this, of course, with her head under the blanket, but it took a while for her to realize that it was Eileen and not Delphine. When she did realize that, she came creeping into the kitchen with the blanket trailing behind her, still half thinking the voice might be a trick.

“Jesus, what is the matter with you?” Eileen said, throwing her arms around her. “Why was the door locked, why didn’t you answer the phone, what kind of game are you up to?”

Lauren held out for about fifteen minutes, with Eileen alternately hugging her and shouting at her. Then she collapsed and told everything. It was a great relief and yet even as she shivered and cried she felt that something private and complex was being traded away for safety and comfort. It wasn’t possible to tell the whole truth because she couldn’t get it straight herself. She couldn’t explain what she had wanted, right up to the point of not wanting it at all.

Eileen phoned Harry and told him that he had to come home. He would have to walk, she could not go to get him, she could not leave Lauren.

She went to unlock the front door and found an envelope, put through the mail slot but unstamped, with nothing written on it but LAUREN.

“Did you hear this come through the slot?” she said. “Did you hear anybody on the porch, how in the fuck did this happen?”

She tore the envelope open and pulled out the gold chain with Lauren’s name on it.

“I forgot to tell you that part,” said Lauren.

“There’s a note.”

“Don’t read it,” Lauren cried. “Don’t read it. I don’t want to hear it.

“Don’t be silly. It can’t bite. She just says she phoned up the school and you weren’t there so she wondered if you were sick and here is a present to cheer you up. She says she bought it for you anyway, nobody lost it. What does that mean? It was going to be a birthday present when you turned eleven in March but she wants you to have it now. Where did she get the idea your birthday was in March? Your birthday is in June.”

“I know that,” said Lauren, in the exhausted, childish, sulky voice she had now fallen back on.

“You see?” said Eileen. “She’s got everything wrong. She’s crazy.”

“She knew your name, though. She knew where you were. How did she know that if you didn’t adopt me?”

“I don’t know how the hell she knew, but she is wrong. She has got it all wrong. Look. We’ll get out your birth certificate. You were born in Wellesley Hospital in Toronto. We’ll take you there, I could show you the exact room—” Eileen looked at the note again and crumpled it in her fist.

“That bitch. Phoning the school,” she said. “Coming to our house. Crazy bitch.”

“Hide that thing,” said Lauren, meaning the chain. “Hide it. Put it away. Now.

Harry was not so angry as Eileen.

“She seemed a perfectly okay person anytime I talked to her,” he said. “She never said anything like this to me.”

“Well, she wouldn’t,” said Eileen. “She wanted to get at Lauren. You have got to go and have a talk with her. Or I will. I mean it. Today.”

Harry said he would. “I’ll straighten her out,” he said. “Absolutely. There won’t be any more trouble. What a shame.”

Eileen made an early lunch. She made hamburgers with mayonnaise and mustard on them, the way Harry and Lauren both liked them. Lauren had finished hers before she realized that it had probably been a mistake to show such an appetite.

“Feeling better?” said Harry. “Back to school this afternoon?”

“I still have got a cold.”

Eileen said, “No. Not back to school. And I am staying home with her.”

“I don’t absolutely see that that’s necessary,” said Harry.

“And give her this,” said Eileen, pushing the envelope into his pocket. “Never mind, don’t bother looking at it, it’s just her stupid present. And tell her no more of that kind of thing ever or she’ll be in trouble. No more ever. No more.”

Lauren never had to go back to school, not in that town.

During the afternoon Eileen phoned Harry’s sister—whom Harry wasn’t speaking to, because of criticisms the sister’s husband had made about his, Harry’s, way of living his life—and they talked about the school that the sister had gone to, a girls’ private school in Toronto. More phone calls followed, an appointment was made.

“It’s not a matter of money,” Eileen said. “Harry has enough money. Or he can get it.

“It’s not just this happening, either,” she said. “You don’t deserve to have to grow up in this crappy town. You don’t deserve to end up sounding like a hick. I’ve been thinking of this all along. I was only putting it off till you got a bit older.”

Harry said, when he came home, that surely it depended on what Lauren wanted.

“You want to leave home, Lauren? I thought you liked it here. I thought you had friends.”

“Friends?” said Eileen. “She had that woman. Del- phine. Did you really get through to her? Did she get the message?”

“I did,” said Harry. “She did.”

“Did you give her back the bribe?”

“If you like to call it that. Yes.”

“No more trouble? She understands, no more trouble?”

Harry turned on the radio and they listened to the news through dinner. Eileen opened a bottle of wine.

“What’s this?” Harry said in a slightly menacing voice. “A celebration?”

Lauren had learned the signs, and she thought she saw what there was to be gone through now, what price there was to be paid for the miraculous rescue—the never having to go back to school or go near the hotel, perhaps never to have to walk in the streets at all, never to go out of the house in the two weeks left before the Christmas holidays.

Wine could be one of the signs. Sometimes. Sometimes not. But when Harry got out the bottle of gin and poured half a tumbler for himself, adding nothing to it but ice—and soon he wouldn’t even be adding ice—the course was set. Everything might still be cheerful but the cheerfulness was hard as knives. Harry would talk to Lauren, and Eileen would talk to Lauren, more than either of them usually talked to her. Now and then they would speak to each other, in almost a normal way. But there would be a recklessness in the room that had not yet been expressed in words. Lauren would hope, or try to hope— more accurately, she used to try to hope—that somehow they would stop the fight from breaking out. And she had always believed—she did yet—that she was not the only one to hope this. They did, too. Partly they did. But partly they were eager for what would come. They never overcame this eagerness. There had never been one time when this feeling was in the room, the change in the air, the shocking brightness that made all shapes, all the furniture and utensils, sharper, yet denser— never one time that the worst did not follow.

Lauren used to be unable to stay in her room, she had to be where they were, flinging herself at them, protesting and weeping, till one or the other would pick her up and carry her back to bed, saying, “All right, all right, don’t bug us, just don’t bug us, it’s our life, we have to be able to talk.” “To talk” meant to pace around the house delivering precise harangues of condemnation, shrieks of contradiction, until they had to start flinging ashtrays, bottles, dishes, at each other. One time Eileen ran outside and threw herself down on the lawn, tearing up chunks of dirt and grass, while Harry hissed from the doorway, “Oh, that’s the style, give them a show.” Once Harry bolted himself in the bathroom, calling, “There’s only one way to get out of this torment.” Both of them threatened the use of pills and razors.

“Oh God, let’s not do this,” Eileen had said once. “Please, please, let’s stop doing this.” And Harry had answered in a high whining voice that cruelly imitated hers, “You’re the one doing it— you stop.”

Lauren had got over trying to figure out what the fights were about. Always about a new thing (tonight she lay in the dark and thought it was probably about her going away, about Eileen’s making that decision on her own) and always about the same thing—the thing that belonged to them, that they could never give up.

She had also got over her idea that there was a tender spot in both of them—that Harry made jokes all the time because he was sad, and Eileen was brisk and dismissive because of something about Harry that seemed to shut her out—and that if she, Lauren, could only explain each of them to the other one, things would get better.

Next day they would be muted, broken, shamed, and queerly exhilarated. “People have to do this, it’s bad to repress your feelings,” Eileen had once told Lauren. “There’s even a theory that repressing anger gives you cancer.”

Harry referred to the fights as rows. “Sorry about the row,” he would say. “Eileen is a very volatile woman. All I can say, sweetie—oh God, all I can say is—these things happen.”

On this night Lauren actually fell asleep before they had really begun to do their damage. Before she was even sure they would do it. The gin bottle hadn’t yet made an appearance when she went away to bed.

Harry woke her up.

“Sorry,” he said. “I’m sorry, honey. Could you just get up and come downstairs?”

“Is it morning?”

“No. It’s still late at night. Eileen and I want to talk to you. We’ve got something to talk to you about. It’s sort of about what you already know. Come on, now. You want your slippers?”

“I hate slippers,” Lauren reminded him. She went ahead of him down the stairs. He was still dressed and Eileen was still dressed too, waiting in the hall. She said to Lauren, “There’s somebody else here that you know.”

It was Delphine. Delphine was sitting on the sofa, wearing a ski jacket over her usual black pants and sweater. Lauren had never seen her in outdoor clothes before. Her face sagged, her skin looked pouchy, her body immensely defeated.

“Can’t we go in the kitchen?” Lauren said. She didn’t know why, but the kitchen seemed safer. Somewhere less special, and with the table to hold on to if they all sat around it.

“Lauren wants to go in the kitchen, we’ll go in the kitchen,” Harry said.

When they were sitting there, he said, “Lauren. I’ve explained that I told you about the baby. About the baby we had before you and what happened to that baby.”

He waited until Lauren said, “Yes.”

“May I say something now?” said Eileen. “May I say something to Lauren?”

Harry said, “Well certainly.”

“Harry could not stand the idea of another baby,” said Eileen, looking down at her hands in her lap under the tabletop. “He couldn’t stand the idea of all the domestic chaos. He had his writing to do. He wanted to achieve things, so he couldn’t have chaos. He wanted me to have an abortion and I said I would and then I said I wouldn’t and then I said I would, but I couldn’t do it and we had a fight and I got the baby and got in the car, I was going to go to some friends’ place. I wasn’t speeding and I certainly was not drunk. It was just the bad light on the road and the bad weather.”

“Also the way the carry-cot was not fastened in,” said Harry.

“But let that go,” he said. “I was not insisting on an abortion. I might have mentioned getting an abortion, but there was no way I would have made you. I didn’t talk about that to Lauren because it would be upsetting for her to hear. It’s bound to be upsetting.”

“Yes, but it’s true,” Eileen said. “Lauren can take it, she knows it wasn’t like it was her.

Lauren spoke up, surprising herself.

“It was me,” she said. “Who was it if it wasn’t me?”

“Yes, but I wasn’t the one wanted to do it,” Eileen said.

“You didn’t altogether not want to do it,” said Harry.

Lauren said, “Stop.”

“This is just what we promised we would not do,” said Harry. “Isn’t this what we promised we would not do? And we should apologize to Delphine.”

Delphine had not looked up at anybody while this talk was going on. She had not pulled her chair up to the table. She didn’t seem to notice when Harry said her name. It wasn’t just defeat that kept her still. It was a weight of obstinacy, even disgust, that Harry and Eileen couldn’t notice.

“I talked to Delphine this afternoon, Lauren. I told her about the baby. It was her baby. I never told you the baby was adopted because it made everything seem worse—that we adopted that baby, and then the way we screwed up. Five years trying, we never thought we’d get pregnant, so we adopted. But Delphine was its mother in the first place. We called it Lauren and then we called you Lauren—I guess because it was our favorite name and also it gave us a feeling we were starting over. And Delphine wanted to know about her baby and she found out we had taken it and naturally she made the mistake of thinking it was you. She came here to find you. It’s all very sad. When I told her the truth she very understandably wanted proof, so I told her to come here tonight and I showed her the documents. She never wanted to steal you away or anything like that, just to make friends with you. She was just lonely and confused.”

Delphine yanked down the zipper of her jacket as if she wanted to get more air.

“And I told her we still had—that we never got around to or it never seemed the right time to—” He waved at the cardboard box that was sitting right out on the counter. “So I showed her that too.

“So tonight as a family,” he said, “tonight while everything is all wide-open, we are going to go out and do this. And get rid of all this—misery and blame. Delphine and Eileen and me, and we want you to come with us—is that all right with you? Are you all right?”

Lauren said, “I was asleep. I’ve got a cold.”

“You might as well do as Harry says,” said Eileen.

Still Delphine never looked up. Harry got the box from the counter and gave it to her. “Maybe you should be the one to carry it,” he said. “Are you all right?”

“Everybody is all right,” Eileen said. “Let’s just go.”

Delphine stood there in the snow, holding the box, so Eileen said, “Should I?” and took it respectfully from her. She opened it up and was going to offer it to Harry, then changed her mind and held it out to Delphine. Delphine lifted out a small handful of ashes, but didn’t take the box to pass it on. Eileen took a handful and gave the box to Harry. When he had got some ashes he was going to hand the box on to Lauren, but Eileen said, “No. She doesn’t have to.”

Lauren had already put her hands in her pockets.

There wasn’t any wind, so the ashes just fell where Harry and Eileen and Delphine let them drop, into the snow.

Eileen spoke as if her throat was sore. “Our Father which art in Heaven—”

Harry said clearly, “This is Lauren, who was our child and whom we all loved—let’s all say it together.” He looked at Delphine, then Eileen, and they all said, “This is Lauren,” with Delphine’s voice very quiet, mumbling, and Eileen’s full of strained sincerity and Harry’s sonorous, presiding, deeply serious.

“And we say good-bye to her and commit her to the snow—”

At the end Eileen said hurriedly, “Forgive us our sins. Our trespasses. Forgive us our trespasses.”

Delphine got into the backseat with Lauren for the ride into town. Harry had held the door open for her to get into the front seat beside him, but she stumbled past him into the back. Relinquishing the more important seat, now that she was not the bearer of the box. She reached into the pocket of her ski jacket to get a Kleenex and in doing so dragged out something that fell on the floor of the car. She gave an involuntary grunt, reaching down to locate it, but Lauren had been quicker. Lauren picked up one of the earrings she had often seen Delphine wear—shoulder-length earrings of rainbow beads that sparkled through her hair. Earrings she must have been wearing this evening, but had thought better to stuff away in her pocket. And just the feel of this earring, the feeling of the cold bright beads slithering through her fingers, made Lauren long suddenly for any number of things to vanish, for Delphine to turn back into the person she had been at the beginning, sitting behind the hotel desk, bold and frisky.

Delphine did not say a word. She took the earring without their fingers touching. But for the first time that evening she and Lauren looked each other in the face. Delphine’s eyes widened and for an instant there was a familiar expression in them, of mockery and conspiracy. She shrugged her shoulders and put the earring in her pocket. That was all—from then on she just looked at the back of Harry’s head.

When Harry slowed to let her out at the hotel, he said, “It would be nice if you could come and have supper with us, some night when you’re not working.”

“I’m pretty much always working,” Delphine said. She got out of the car and said, “Good-bye,” to none of them in particular, and stumped along the mushy sidewalk into the hotel.

On the way home Eileen said, “I knew she wouldn’t.”

Harry said, “Well. Maybe she appreciated that we asked.”

“She doesn’t care about us. She only cared about Lauren, when she thought Lauren was hers. Now she doesn’t care about her either.”

“Well, we care,” said Harry, his voice rising. “She’s ours.”

“We love you, Lauren,” he said. “I just want to tell you one more time.”

Hers. Ours.

Something was prickling Lauren’s bare ankles. She reached down and found that burrs, whole clusters of burrs, were clinging to her pajama legs.

“I got burrs from under the snow. I’ve got hundreds of burrs.”

“I’ll get them off you when we get home,” Eileen said. “I can’t do anything about them now.”

Lauren was furiously pulling the burrs off her pajamas. And as soon as she got those loose she found that they were hanging on to her fingers. She tried to loosen them with the other hand and in no time they were clinging to all the other fingers. She was so sick of these burrs that she wanted to beat her hands and yell out loud, but she knew that the only thing she could do was just sit and wait.