narrow and slanted over very high and prominent cheekbones. Her nose was short, and tilted up at an angle that might have made it seem ugly on another face. Her mouth was wide, her lips firm and full above a squarish chin that was cleft in the middle. She wore her hair in two gold braids encircling her small, regal head. Her expression was habitually one of total impassivity, but it nevertheless gave to strangers an impression of contemptuous arrogance, even cruelty: with her slanted eyes and lithe, compact body, she might have been a princess of the Huns.
Melody was Marcia’s oldest child—her child, not Ken’s. She had been conceived at the time of Marcia’s nervous breakdown at the commune in the Black Hills, and Marcia didn’t know who her father was.
Marcia found the courage necessary to walk into the living room and determine what was going on. Melody turned her expressionless face toward her mother. She could light up a room when she smiled, but she seldom did.
“Lucy’s gone,” Melody said gravely.
“Oh, God,” Marcia groaned, half in relief. “Turn the music down, won’t you?”
Melody got up to comply as her mother sank into a chair. Melody had highbrow taste that ran to the more obscure baroque composers. Marcia preferred rock. Sometimes she had the odd feeling that her daughter was more mature than she was.
“What happened?” Marcia asked when the music had been muted to a silvery whisper.
Melody shrugged. “He just didn’t show up for his dinner. The kids carried on something awful. They wouldn’t go to bed until Ken promised to drive around and look for him.”
“He’s probably in love again.”
Melody studied her for a long moment, then said: “Maybe. He’s been wandering off at night a lot. But I think this is the first time in his life he ever missed his dinner. I think the dognappers got him this time.”
“Oh, I don’t think so. Who’d steal a Doberman?”
“That’s the kind they want. I read in this article. Because everybody is scared and wants to have a killer dog. Plus they want them for dog-fights, with betting.”
“Well. If that’s the case, they’ll give him back when they find out what they’ve stolen.”
Marcia’s relief that her children were safe didn’t last long. A sudden pang of grief hit her at the thought of Lucifer’s possible theft. His personality was unique among his breed. He would make playful but timid overtures to cats and rabbits. He had always reminded her of Ferdinand the Bull, who would rather smell flowers than face matadors. The idea of his theft by men who would try to train him to viciousness was almost unbearable.
Nor was that her only worry. “How did Ken take all this? I mean, what kind of mood was he in?”
“You mean, was he drunk?” Melody asked.
Marcia was often disconcerted by her daughter’s talent for discerning her unspoken thoughts.
“Not really,” Melody went on, as if answering herself. “He was sort of harassed and fretful, you know, with the kids acting up. And he thinks Lucifer is a royal pain in the ass anyway. I guess mostly he was happy for an excuse to get out of the house.”
Melody had resisted early efforts to make her call Ken “Dad,” and she had always felt free to speak her mind about him. In many ways, she was more like a younger sister to Marcia than a daughter. For babysitting wages, she took much of the burden of the younger children—Roger, ten, and Karen, eight—from Marcia’s shoulders. Marcia wasn’t sure whether this arrangement was the healthiest one for her and Melody, but it seemed to work smoothly; and it permitted her to keep her job at the Banner.
It was awkward, therefore, to assume a parental manner as she asked, “And why aren’t you in bed?”
Melody shrugged. Marcia thought she caught a flicker of emotion on her daughter’s face, an emotion that might have been anxiety.
“You have school tomorrow, don’t you?”
“School sucks.”
“Oh, Melody. I wish you wouldn’t talk that way.”
“Well, it does. When I get interested in something, it always turns out to be so easy that it bores me. And the other stuff just bores me, period. Plus all the kids act like they’re still twelve years old.”
Marcia stared out at the well-swept carpet of pebbles, dominated by a grotesque stone god, that was the Japanese garden. Melody was a precocious girl, mentally and physically mature beyond her years. Because she was so intelligent and self-sufficient, because she looked and talked so much like a self-possessed young adult, it was easy to put aside her problems until more pressing matters had been settled. But she did have problems. She couldn’t relate to her contemporaries, she had no close female friends, and she habitually chilled suitors with her incisive wit. It must have taken great emotional effort for her to maintain her cool façade at all times, and maybe that effort would eventually prove too much of a strain for someone who was really still a child.
But, as always seemed to be the case, this wasn’t the time to hold a serious talk with Melody. She ought to be in bed. Marcia herself was tired, and she had to look in on the other children.
“School bored me, too,” Marcia said, rising. “But you have to put up with it so you can go on to college, where it gets interesting.”
“You didn’t go to college,” Melody stated.
“No, but I regret it. Get ready for bed, okay?”
Marcia left the room, fully aware that her argument had been unconvincing; but it had been the best she could offer at this hour, in this state of mind. Ken had once told her that the motto that had sustained him through the army had been, “Grit your teeth and put in your time.” Had this become the motto of her own life, and was she trying to pass on this wisdom to her daughter? It was an arid philosophy, but it worked from day to day.
She gently opened the door of the room that the two younger children shared, an arrangement that Roger was growing to resent. He had reached the age when he preferred snakes and turtles to girls, and he regarded his little sister as the worst of a bad lot.
Marcia was surprised, even so, to find them sleeping in their own beds. In far less traumatic crises than the present one, Karen would wait for Roger to drop off, then sneak into his bed and cuddle up beside him. That never failed to provoke a bellow of rage from Roger when he woke up in the morning.
They had inherited her coloring: raven-black hair, dark eyes, rosy-white complexions. She watched them sleeping for a while by the dim illumination of their night-light, then stepped forward quietly to fuss with Karen’s covers. The act was unnecessary, but she wanted to do something to express the sudden upsurge of warmth she felt at the sight of her sleeping children.
She was forced to admit that life was more than an exercise in meaningless stoicism. Quiet moments like this gave meaning to all of it.
“Mommy?”
Karen’s sleep had apparently not been sound. Eyes that seemed bottomless in their night-adapted darkness gazed up at Marcia.
“Shh. Sleep now.”
“Mommy, are
