When Laura got home from the Burt Reynolds movie, she found a message on the machine.

Beep. "Laura, hi. Listen, the work's taking longer than we thought. I'll be in around midnight, but don't wait up. I'm sorry about this. I'll take you to dinner tomorrow night, okayi Your choice. Back to the salt mines." Click.

He didn't say I love you, Laura thought.

a wave of incredible sadness threatened to break over her, she could feel its weight poised above her head. Where had he called fromi Surely not the office. Someone's apartment, maybe. Eric was in Charleston. Doug had lied about that, and what else was he lying abouti

He had not said I love you, she thought, because there was another woman with him.

She started to call his office, but she put down the phone. What was the point of iti What was the point of any of iti She wandered the house, not quite sure of her destination. She wound through the kitchen, the dining room, the living room, and the bedroom, her eyes taking note of their possessions: hunting prints on the walls, here a Waterford crystal vase, there an armchair from Colonial Williamsburg, a bowl of glass apples, a bookcase filled with Literary Guild best sellers neither of them had bothered to read. She opened both their closets, looked at his Brooks Brothers suits and his power ties, looked at her own designer dresses and her variety of expensive shoes. She retreated from there and walked into the nursery.

The crib was ready. The walls were light blue, and a Buckhead artist had painted tiny, brightly colored balloons around the room just below the ceiling. The room still smelled faintly of fresh paint. a mobile of plastic fish hung above the crib, ready to be tossed and jangled.

Doug was with another woman.

Laura found herself back in the bathroom, looking at herself in the mirror under an unkind light. She released the gold clasp that pinned her hair and let it fall free around her shoulders in a chestnut cascade. Her eyes stared at her eyes, light blue as the sky of april. Tiny wrinkles were creeping in around them, foretellers of the future. They were the briefest impressions of crow's feet now, but later they would become the tracks of hawks. Dark circles there, too; she needed more sleep than she was getting. If she looked hard enough, she would find too many strands of gray in her hair. She was nearing forty, the black-balloon year. She was already six years past that age you weren't supposed to trust anybody over. She regarded her face: sharp nose and firm chin, thick dark eyebrows and a high forehead. She wished she had the etched cheekbones of a model instead of chipmunk cheeks grown plumper with baby fluids, but those had always been so. She had never been an awe-inspiring beauty, and in fact she had been homely  -  a quaint word  -  until her sixteenth year. Not many dates, but many books had filled her time. Dreams of travel, and of the crusading reporter. She was very attractive with makeup, but her features took on a harder quality without the paints and powders. It was in her eyes, especially, when she didn't have on liner and eyeshadow: a chilly brooding, the light blue the color of packed ice instead of springtime. They were the eyes of someone who senses time being lost, time going into the dark hole of the past like alice after her white rabbit.

She wondered what the girl looked like. She wondered what her voice sounded like when she spoke Doug's name.

Sitting in the theater with a big tub of buttered popcorn on her lap, Laura had realized there were things she had chosen not to see in the last couple of months. a long golden hair on a suit jacket, lying curled up like a question mark. a scent that was not her own. a flush of makeup smeared on a shirt cuff. Doug drifting into thought when she talked to him about the baby; to whom had he run in his dreamsi He was like the invisible man, wrapped up in bandages; if she dared to unwrap him, she might find nothing at home.

Doug was with another woman, and David moved in Laura's belly.

She sighed, a small sound, and she turned off the bathroom light.

In the darkness, she cried a little. Then she blew her nose and wiped her eyes, and she decided she would not say a word about this night. She would wait, and watch, and let time spin out its wire for fools like her to dance upon.

She took off her clothes and got ready for bed. The rain outside was intermittent, hard and soft, like two instruments playing at odds. In the bed, she stared at the ceiling with a babycare book next to her on the bedside table. She thought of her lunch with Carol today, and her vision of the angry hippie who used to be.

Laura realized, quite suddenly, that she'd forgotten what a peace sign looked like.

Thirty-six, she thought. Thirty-six. She placed her hands on David's swell. a funny thing, all those people who said not to trust anyone over thirty. Real funny.

They had been right.

Laura turned out the light and searched for sleep.

She found it after twenty minutes or so, and then the dream came. In it, a woman held a shrieking baby by the back of its neck, and she screamed toward the sea of blue lights, "Come on, come on you pigfuckers, come on ain't gonna kiss your ass no more ain't gonna kiss nobody's ass!" She shook the baby like a ragged flag, and the sharpshooter on the roof behind Laura radioed on the walkie-talkie that he couldn't drop the woman without hitting the baby. "Come on, you bastards!" the woman shouted, her teeth glinting. Blood was splattered over the yellow flowers on her dress, and her hair was the color of iron. "Come on, fuck you! Hear mei" She shook the baby again, and its scream made Laura flinch and step back into the protection of the police cars. Somebody brushed past her and told her to get out of the way. Somebody else spoke over a bullhorn to the woman who stood on the apartment's balcony, the words like a rumble of dumb thunder across the sweltering projects. The woman on the balcony stepped over the dead man at her feet, his head shot open like a clay pot, and she held the pistol against the infant's skull. "Come on and take me!" she hollered. "Come on, we'll go to hell together, okayi" She began to laugh then, a cocaine giggle, and the inhuman tragedy of that hopeless laugh crashed around Laura and made her retreat. She bumped into other reporters, the TV people on the scene. They were grim and efficient, but Laura saw something darkly joyous in their eyes. She couldn't look in their faces without feeling shamed. "Crazy bitch!" somebody yelled, a man who lived in the projects. "Put down that baby!" another voice, a woman's: "Shoot her 'fore she kills that baby! Somebody shoot her!"

But the madwoman on the balcony had found her stage, and she paced it with the pistol's barrel against the infant's skull and her audience spread out in the parking lot below. "ain't gonna give him up!" she hollered. "ain't gonna!" Her shadow was thrown large by the lights, and moths fluttered in the heat. "ain't gonna take what's mine!" she shouted, her voice hoarse and cracking. "Told him! Told him! ain't nobody gonna take what's mine away from me! Swear to Jesus, I told him!" a sob burst out, and Laura saw the woman's body tremble. "ain't gonna! Oh my Jesus, ain't gonna take what's mine! Fuck you!" she roared at the lights and the police cars and the TV cameras and the snipers and Laura Beale. "Fuck you!" Someone began playing an electric guitar in one of the other apartments, the volume cranked up to earsplitting, and the noise of the bullhorn and the walkie-talkies, the reporters, the onlookers, and the raging of the madwoman merged into a single terrifying sound that Laura would forever think must be the voice of Evil.

The woman on the balcony lifted her face to the night, her mouth open in an animal scream.

a sniper fired. Pop, like a backfire.

Pop went the pistol in the woman's hand as the back of her head blew apart.

Laura felt something warm and damp on her face. She gasped, fighting upward through the dream.

Doug's face was over her. The light was on. He was smiling, his eyes a little puffy. She realized he had just kissed her.

"Hi," he said. "Sorry I'm so late."

She couldn't make her mouth work. In her mind she was still at the projects, on that hot night in July, and moths spun before the lights as the policemen stormed the building. Perpetrator down, perpetrator down, she heard a policeman saying into a walkie-talkie. Three bodies up there. Captain. She took the kid out.

"Got a kiss for mei" Doug asked.

She gave him one, on the cheek, and she smelled the scent that was not her own.

"Rainy out," Doug said as he unknotted his tie. "Traffic's pretty bad."

Laura closed her eyes, listening to Doug move around the bedroom. The closet opened and closed. The toilet flushed. Water ran in the sink. Brushing his teeth. Gargling, good old Scope. When would he realize about the ticketsi she wondered. Or maybe he was past caringi

Her hands met over the bulge of her belly. Her fingers laced together and locked.

She slept, this time mercifully without dreams.

In her womb, David was still. Doug placed his hand against Laura's stomach, feeling the baby's heat, and then he sat on the side of the bed looking at his hand and remembering where it had been. Bastard, he told himself. Stupid, selfish bastard. He felt swollen with lies, bloated with them, and how he could look into Laura's face he didn't know. But he was a survivor and he had a silver tongue, and he would do what he had to do in a world where you took what you could get when you could get it.

He had a bad taste in his mouth. He left the bedroom and walked into the kitchen, where he opened the refrigerator and got out a carton of orange juice. He poured himself a glassful, and he was nearing the bottom of the glass when he saw the two ticket stubs next to the telephone. It hit him like a punch between the eyes: he'd forgotten to throw them away since he'd taken Cheryl to see a Tom Cruise movie across town a few nights ago. He almost choked on the orange juice, almost bit through the glass. The ticket stubs. There they were. Right there. From his pants pocket. The ones he'd taken off. Oh, great! Laura had found them. Damn it to hell, what was she doing going through his pocketsi a man had a right to privacy! Hold on, don't lose it. Just hold on. He picked up the stubs, remembering when he'd pocketed them. Right after that, Cheryl had guided him to the snack bar for kingsize Cokes and Milk Duds. His eyes ticked back and forth from the telephone to the ticket stubs; he didn't like what he was thinking, but why were the stubs next to the telephonei He felt heat working in his face, and he started to throw the stubs into a trash can but stopped his hand. No, no; leave them where they were. Exactly where they were. Finish your juice. Go to bed. Think about it, and come up with a story. Right, right. a story. Client in town, wanted to see a movie. Uh-huh. Selling limited partnerships in movie companies, and a client wanted to check out a movie. Sure.

Laura wasn't dumb, that was for certain. He would have to work on the story. If she asked. If she didn't... he wouldn't volunteer anything.

Doug returned the ticket stubs to where they'd been. He drank down the rest of his orange juice; it was very bitter toward the end. Then he started back into the bedroom, where his wife lay sleeping and his son was curled up in her belly waiting to be born. Before he got there, he thought of something Freud had said, that nobody ever truly forgets anything. He set the alarm clock for an early hour, lay in the dark for a while listening to Laura breathe and wondering how he'd gotten here from the moment they had exchanged vows and rings, and finally sleep took him.

Seven miles could be the distance between worlds. It was that far  -  that close  -  to the apartment where Mary Terror slept with her new baby cradled against her. She made a soft, moaning noise, and her hand drifted down and pressed against her scars. The baby stared out at the world through painted eyes, his body giving off no warmth.

Rain fell on the roofs of the just and unjust, the saints and the sinners, those who knew peace and those in torment, and tomorrow began at a dark hour.