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“It can’t hurt anyone, she thought. Sally will never find out, and I would never ask Bay to leave her. Daddy won’t know. Who can it hurt?

It was the first time in her adult life that she had been dependent on another person for her entire emotional existence, and instead of reacting with her customary cool wariness, she abandoned herself to it entirely and voluptuously. This is what love is, then, she would think as she felt him swell inside her until he filled the world. Yes. How could I not have known?

On that first afternoon, he said, “I’ve never forgotten you, not for one minute of one day, after all this time. That last day—that was the worst day of my life, except the next one, when we knew you’d gone. I’d give anything I’ve got to be able to go back and undo that day. I should have gone with you, I should have looked for you until I found you—but I didn’t. I thought you would come home when school started. I waited and waited. I was so sure you would. And then we heard you were married. I thought I was going to die. I don’t even remember that fall and winter. And now I want you so much I think I’m going to die again, and
I’m … locked in. I can’t leave. You do know that, don’t you, Mike? I can’t leave …”

“I don’t want you to leave,” she said, burying her face in the musky wetness where his arm joined his chest. “I will never ask you to leave. I only want this, now, right at this minute. That’s all; that’s enough. I can’t really regret the way things happened, Bay. I can’t even say that my marriage was a mistake. Without it, I never would have had Rachel. I never would have had any sort of career …”

“Is it so important, then? Your career? Is it enough?” he looked at her searchingly in the dim amber light from behind the
Venetian
blinds.

“It has been,” she said slowly. “It always has been. But now … I don’t know. I don’t feel like a journalist. I don’t feel like a mother. I don’t feel like anything but … a body with a huge hole in it. Which you are about to plug with extreme gusto, aren’t you? Right here? And then … oh, God, here …”

Afterwards, his breath laboring in his throat, he touched the warm wetness between her legs.

“I’d like to kill anybody who’s ever touched you here,” he said. “Your famous Richard, or anybody else. I don’t ever want to know about the others who have. But … oh, Christ, Mike, were there many others?”

“Yes,” Mike said, in pain. “There were … a good many others. I’ve been looking for something … somebody … all my life who could … fill me up, I guess I mean. Stop that dull, awful, constant, itching ache in there. Nobody did, nobody could, but I sure gave it a good try. And I regret every one of them, Bay. It was just so obviously you that I wanted. All over me. And in me and through me and behind and in front of me … always you. You don’t need to hear about the men. You don’t need to know anything about how I’ve lived before now. It doesn’t matter. What comes next is not going to matter. I don’t want to think about it. I
don’t want to talk about it … not yesterday, not tomorrow. And I won’t talk about it. I don’t give a damn about anything but now.”

“Then now it is, and now it will be,” he said. “You’re home now. I’m here now.”

Yes, Mike thought. I
am
home. Home is where Bay is.

She was adamant about it. She would not discuss her life before she came home to Lytton. She would not discuss her father. She would not talk about the action that Sam Canaday was bringing against the Department of Transportation on his behalf. One afternoon, early on in their relationship, Bayard Sewell pushed her gently to tell him about the status of the action, and she demurred impatiently.

“We’ve only got an hour,” she said fretfully. “I don’t want to waste it talking about that damned case. I don’t
know
anything about it. I don’t want to know.”

“I’m only concerned because I want so badly to help John,” Bayard Sewell said. “And I feel so helpless. Canaday is playing it goddamned closemouthed, and your dad seems … vague, uncertain … when I try to talk to him. I’m awfully afraid that know-nothing shyster is riding him for a bad fall. I wish he’d leave your dad the hell alone. I wish he wasn’t in the house with you.”

“Oh, God, Bay, I don’t even
see
him,” she said impatiently. “I make it a point not to go near him when he’s here. I’m bored sick with Sam Canaday and I’m bored with talking about him.”

She shook her hair back off her damp face as if tossing aside a biting insect. Even unseen, Sam Canaday was as all-pervasive and pungent as a powerful odor.

“I only care about it because I don’t want it to touch you. I don’t want whatever’s hurting your father to hurt you, and I don’t want
him
to hurt you,” he said,
smoothing the wild, silken mop away from her flushed face.

“He can’t,” Mike said. “Nothing can, now.”

Bayard Sewell spoke no more of Sam Canaday and the action against the Department of Transportation.

Nearly two weeks went by before Mike went again to Priss Comfort’s little stone house by the ball field. She had not consciously stayed away, but the blazing reality of the few afternoon hours in her dim, enclosing cave of a room had dwarfed and distanced everything else around her in Lytton, and most of the time that she was not actually in the room and joined with Bayard Sewell, pumping with all her body and soul to turn herself inside out and into the very flesh of him, she was remembering just how it had been the last time, or waiting in pure flame for it to happen again. Mike was an abstracted automaton with quivering nerve endings on every inch of her skin. When she found occasion to do so, she mentioned Bayard Sewell to whomever was present, just to taste the roundness of his name on her tongue as she would, later that day, taste the hot, damp flesh of him. She did a few dreamlike errands in town, cooked a few perfunctory meals, slept in long, deadened drifts of time, ate little, nodded dreamily to Sam Canaday the few times she could not avoid seeing him in the house, and took a great many baths. Somehow, in the tepid water of the grainy old tub, the fires inside her cooled and softened a little. She found a box of her old childhood books in the back of the closet in her room, and after that, late into the cicada-humming nights, her lamp spilled down over the yellowed and crumbling pages of
Black Beauty
and
The Wind in the Willows
and the old Arthur Rackham edition of
The Water Babies
. The loved, half-remembered small worlds of the books were as real to her, in those first hot nights, as the one around her.

“Well, I thought you’d left us for good,” Priss grumbled
as Mike ambled into the little house one hot morning, eating the first of the local peaches. “Holed up in your room and starved yourself to death, or something. Sit down there and let me get you something with more heft to it than that peach. You look like Mahatma Gandhi. I feel very honored that you’d leave the inner sanctum for the likes of me.”

“Oh, don’t be cross,” Mike grinned at her. “Who told you I was holed up in my room, as you put it?” Her words were casual, but she felt sharpened and alerted. No one must know about the afternoons in that room …

“DeeDee said that Lavinia Lester told her you spent a lot of time up there,” Priss said. “DeeDee made a special trip last week to see if I’d heard about the charming little dinner party at the Sewells’ house. Said she thought sure you’d have told me about it, and when I said no, you hadn’t been by, she said Lavinia had said you’d taken to your bed. Proper full of it, Dee was. Absolutely sure you were stricken to the vapors with embarrassment and God knows what else. I told her most likely you were stricken with a powerful urge to avoid her. I think I may have made her mad. She turned right red.”

“Oh, lord, Dee drives me crazy,” Mike snapped. “I’m not stricken with embarrassment, and I haven’t been hiding in my room. I’m just catching up on my sleep, like I always do when I let down after a long assignment. I told you I would. As for the dinner party, it was pretty awful, but nothing Bay couldn’t and didn’t handle. I guess he’s an old hand at it by now. It was terrible, though, Priss. I’m truly sorry for her; she’s an appealing little thing, and she obviously adores him, and he does her. But why in God’s name, if she does, can’t she control herself on the one night when he’s got an old friend back in town and wants to show his wife off? He was wonderful about the whole thing, but you
could tell he was just in agony over her. It was such a godawful, ghastly shock.”

“I don’t know why it should be,” Priss said coldly. Mike looked at her in surprise. Priss’s serene face was stony.

“I don’t know what he thought would happen to her, just a few days out of a sanitarium and meeting the woman her husband almost married for the first time. I don’t know what he thought she’d do. Booze flowing like water, and her trying to be a hostess, and please him, and make a good impression on you, and deal with Duck and DeeDee, which would turn many a stronger soul to the bottle for good … I don’t know what in God’s name he expected. Maybe just what he got.”

“Priss!”
Mike was shrill with surprise and outrage.

Priss looked at her, a long, measuring look, and then the ice-green eyes softened, and dropped.

“Oh, God, Mike,” she said. “Don’t mind me. You just seemed so like the eight-year-old I remember for a minute … forget it, please. I never could talk to you about Bayard Sewell.”

After that, Mike spoke no more of him, to Priss or anyone else, but he roared inside her like the sea.

D
ON’T TELL ME, LET ME GUESS …
G
IDGET GOES TO
cooking school?” Sam Canaday said, coming into the kitchen on a thundery morning that June. Mike looked up from the kitchen counter, where she was stirring butter and cocoa. Her hair was tied back into a ponytail with blue yarn, and she wore cutoff blue jeans and a soft old shirt of Richard’s. Her feet were bare.

“And who’re you this morning, Tab Hunter on date night?” She took in his blue blazer, gray slacks, and red-striped tie. She had never seen him in a coat and tie. He looked totally different; thinner, finer-featured, somehow younger. His blond hair was dark-damp, comb tracks showing clearly under the fluorescent overhead light. The high ridges of his cheekbones looked newly touched by sun.

“Touché. You do look about fourteen, though. And I’d say you’d either gotten an A on your algebra final or broken up with your boyfriend. Is that fudge for celebration or consolation?”

“It’s for an orgy. I’m going to eat the whole panful by myself in front of the television set this afternoon. Have a piece of that other; you’d better move fast, before it’s gone.”

He reached for a piece of glossy fudge cooling on the old yellow Fiestaware platter that Mike had pulled out of a bottom cupboard.

“Mmmm,” he said. “From the looks of your chin, I’d say you’ve been hitting the fudge fairly steadily. Better watch out, or you’ll come up with a crop of zits. Not to mention a real behind. Is that the beginning of a hip I see there?”

He leered at her tight denim shorts.

“I’m afraid so,” Mike said. “They were baggy not two weeks ago. God knows what I’ll have to wear if I don’t stop eating and get some exercise.”

“Well, it looks good,” he said appraisingly. “Like you’ve finally gotten enough sleep. All the corners are gone. You’ve gotten a little sun, too. It’s not hard to see that you were the cutest girl at the prom.”

“I never went to the prom,” she said. “But thanks for them kind words. I didn’t know you noticed things like hips and suntans.”

“Good God, woman, and me a true son of the old South? I didn’t spend four years in the horniest high school in America for nothing. Of course I notice hips.”

He was as good as his word. His gaze followed her as she moved around the kitchen, pouring the fudge onto a second buttered platter, washing the mixing bowl, putting it away. She could feel his eyes on her body and legs; she began to be almost uncomfortable in the short shorts and the soft-clinging shirt. She wore no bra beneath it, and she was suddenly very conscious of her nipples pushing against the thin worn oxford cloth.

She did, she knew, look almost like a teenager. It was by design. Bayard Sewell had told her, hand deep in the tangle of her ashen hair, that he had always loved the ponytail she had worn during high school, and she had tied it back that same evening and left it that way. When he had mentioned how pale and gaunt her body looked, remembering the summers when she was lithe
and golden from the constant swimming, she began lying out on the grass behind the house in the mornings, till she ran with sweat and could bear it no longer. He had an insatiable sweet tooth that he had not had when they had been together before for bland, cloying, nurserylike concoctions, and so she made it her custom to take a sweet treat up to the bedroom each afternoon that he came, and they demolished the candy and cakes and cookies as ravenously as they fed on each other’s bodies, and Mike soon began to lose the sharp edges and angles that had made her avert her head when she passed a mirror. He liked the change in her; liked the greedy, sated, knowing child she had become. With him she was a wanton prepubescent in whom appetite and impulse held sway as they never had in her actual child’s years in this house, and in whom she moved like a swimmer fathoms deep in a warm sea.

“You’re almost like you used to be, but about a hundred thousand times sexier,” he said. “A little girl who knows a fancy whore’s tricks. It’s an incredible combination.”

She wondered, though, what sort of child it was he really met in her; somehow she thought perhaps it was that forlorn child of this place that he saw.

Mike knew that the others saw a change, too, and knew that they studied her when they thought she was not aware of it. More than once she had caught long, measuring looks from Priss and Sam Canaday, and veiled ones from Dee. Her father alone of the people around her did not seem to notice a difference. There was less tension, less revived animosity, between them, but then, she saw him even less now that Lavinia Lester had established herself in the house during the days, and in her newly obsessive state, the contacts that she did have with him nettled her less. The upshot was that Mike was kinder to her father, and he, in turn, had drawn in his horns somewhat.