It might have been at the reception that inaugurated the memorial in Friendship Park, in a gazebo above the river, or in another, similar reception in Carnegie House, that Zeno had conspicuously too much to drink, where previously he'd only just had too much to drink; his drinking was beginning to be noted by others, outside his family and close friends. For Zeno was unhappy, and it wasn't in Zeno Mayfield's nature to be unhappy alone. He was a public man ill suited to the discretions of private life. Yet in the midst of the chattering crowd he felt ungainly, exposed. He'd always taken refuge in social life, in the peculiar thrill of a social event, in which Zeno Mayfield was one of those who shone with an indomitable luster, yet now he felt out of place. Lines from Shakespeare's King Lear were running through his mind, the despairing words of the elderly Lear to his murdered daughter Cordelia whom he'd stupidly misjudged and wronged-" 'Why should a dog, a horse, a rat have life / and thou no breath at all?' "

This was the profound question, to which there was no answer.

He drank too much wine, out of small plastic cups. You are supposed to sip white wine sparingly, while conversing with others who are sipping wine; you are not supposed to drink the wine as Zeno drank the wine, in thirsty gulps. You are not supposed to wipe your mouth with the back of your hand.

And then Zeno's crude fingers misjudged the strength of the plastic cup, squeezed too hard and cracked it and white wine splattered onto his clothes.

"Fuck."

"Oh Daddy." Juliet was staring at him in dismay.

She'd been about to dab at him with a paper napkin but now hesitated, the fierce look in Zeno's face.

Soon it would be said Poor Zeno. The drinking is getting out of hand, even Zeno can't hide it.

And soon it would be said Poor Arlette! How long can she endure it?

HE LOVED HER. His little family, he'd loved.

Hadn't had a son, who'd have challenged him in ways other than the ways in which his daughters had challenged him. And so maybe, Zeno had to concede, he was incomplete, immature: he'd always been the adored husband, adored Daddy.

But he'd loved them, to desperation. Each of his daughters had seemed to him a miraculous birth. And his wife Arlette he'd come to love ever more deeply.

Yet, he'd come also to resent her, after Cressida's disappearance.

After the acknowledgment of death, and the need to memorialize, celebrate.

At first they'd mourned together. They'd even been drinking together.

Then by degrees it had seemed that Arlette was detaching herself from him. Like one in a comforting embrace that had turned smothering.

Bitterly he'd resented her, what he saw as her Christian acceptance of their loss. While in a part of Zeno's brain, it may have been his most primitive brain, he continued to believe that their daughter might be alive simply because they had no proof of her death.

In his confused and anarchic dreams, Cressida was certainly alive.

Not his daughter as he remembered her but as a wrathful though silent female figure, a daughter out of mythology. The alcohol-fueled dreams were mixed with alcohol-fueled memories of the Nautauga Preserve and the nightmare search that had come to nothing. And yet at the time it had seemed to the deluded father quite natural, the daughter had not been found. Of course. She is nowhere near. She has vanished. But she is alive.

Folly to think this way. Not-healthy, morbid and neurotic.

Yet after a few bottles of beer, a few glasses of wine, whiskey-and-ice, it became the natural, the logical, the inevitable and even the commonsensical thing to think.

Vanished. But still alive.

Zeno wanted to rage: no one understood who didn't drink. Drinking makes all of history present-tense. The past is lost, the future is inaccessible, all that is, is now.

He'd smiled, such solace! Pouring another drink.

"IT'S AGAINST NATURE to stop time. To try to stop time. You used to say-the fallacy in Plato is that he believed you could 'stop' time-that nothing that changes can be good. But change is our lives, Zeno-God would not wish us to remain unchanged. It is part of God's plan that our daughter should vanish from our lives."

In such ways Arlette began to speak. Not while drinking with Zeno but in the aftermath of drinking with Zeno.

Zeno listened in astonishment. As if another individual, a stranger to him, stood in Arlette's place.

His wife! His wife.

"What Brett did-he hadn't meant to do. It was brave of him to confess such a terrible thing. He can't bring Cressida back but our anger at him can't bring her back, either." Arlette paused, choosing her words with care as if knowing how each would stick in Zeno, irremediably.

Then, plunging head-on: "He's sick-he's a victim, too. Both their young lives-destroyed. We must try to forgive him."

Arlette's brave voice cracked just perceptibly with forgive.

Zeno muttered something inaudible.

"Zeno, what? What are you saying?"

"I said fuck that! Fuck 'forgive.' "

He'd blundered out of the room. A wounded bear on its hind legs baited and blinded beyond endurance, desperate to escape but where to escape?-in his own household, where the woman with whom he shared the house naturally followed him through all the rooms and if he locked a door, locked himself inside a bathroom for instance, she had every right to rattle the doorknob alarmed and anxious and straining to keep her voice level in the way of a responsible wife-mother.

"You are only wounding yourself, Zeno. We have to forgive. Cressida is beyond harm now."

IT WASN'T CLEAR that Arlette was moving away. As it was painfully clear, Juliet had moved away.

Was it Zeno's fault? That the tightrope-walk of sobriety, each day, unfailingly each day, the dull-ghastly horror of sobriety, the banality of sobriety, was too much for him?

That, descending a flight of stairs, there began to be times when he gripped-grasped-the railing to keep from pitching forward headfirst? Or that, seeing awkward smiles before him, at a dinner party for instance, he'd have to laugh, embarrassed, and confess-"What was I saying? Sorry."

It had long been a custom in the Mayfield family that, in any vehicle in which Zeno Mayfield was riding, Zeno Mayfield was the designated driver. (With the exception of those periods of time when his daughters were taking driver's education and had driver's permits.) Now it began to be the custom that Zeno drove to a social event at which there was alcohol, and Arlette drove them back; then, it began to be a custom that Arlette drove both to the event and back home.

Then, it began to be a custom that Arlette declined such invitations. With or without consulting Zeno.

Social drinker.

Not so bad as a solitary drinker!

(Of course, Zeno was a solitary drinker, too. But no one knew.) (No one knew? Not likely.) It began to be a-kind of a-floating weirdness: a gaping emptiness beyond Zeno's foot shy-groping on a flight of stairs down.

As if, if all of his senses weren't sharp-alert, he'd lose consciousness, lose balance and down-fall.

Saying to Arlette, as if their argument had been smoldering underground like those subterranean fuel-fields in a blistered Pennsylvania landscape smoldering for decades, "If you forgive him, you are insulting those of us who love her. You are insulting her."

He was shaking. Such resentment he felt for this mild-mannered woman his wife, such sudden hatred, a shock to Zeno as to her.

"Zeno, no. Forgiveness is an individual choice. If you chose to hate Brett Kincaid rather than forgive him-I mean 'forgive' him in some way-that is your prerogative. You can't know what our daughter would have wanted. By now, she might have forgiven Brett herself."

It was a brave tremulous speech. Guessing how close her husband was to grasping her shoulders and shake-shake-shaking her, in husbandly indignation.

"That's bullshit, Arlette. Kincaid hurt her, and then he drowned her. Her tossed our daughter away like garbage."

"You don't know that. You don't know how much of his confession was 'true.' His memory has been damaged. We've discussed this."

Discussed. This was an understatement.

As the father of the victim Zeno had been astonished-you might say outraged, furious-that observers assumed a right to have opinions on the case; assumed a right to comment, some of them in print, that Corporal Brett Kincaid hadn't been of sufficiently sound mind to understand the criminal charges against him and to participate in his defense; still more, hadn't been of sufficiently sound mind to have committed any crime. And whether the charge brought by the prosecutor after negotiating with the defense attorney should have been second-degree murder, or manslaughter.

Others believed that Kincaid had committed a vicious brutal murder and that the prosecutor was being overly lenient in allowing him to plead guilty to reduced charges of manslaughter.

Some might have wished for Kincaid to be sentenced to death. But Zeno was not one of these.

For Zeno didn't believe in the death penalty. Even for the vicious brutal murderer of his daughter.

As to the matter of Kincaid being capable of participating in his own defense and knowing "right from wrong"-Beechum County sheriff's deputies had testified that Kincaid had lied to them when he'd been first apprehended and brought to headquarters; he'd made an effort to "cover up his crime"-"to mislead." This is a principle in criminal law, that a perpetrator who tries to cover up his crime has understood that he has committed a crime: one who seeks to "mislead" understands that he has a reason for doing so.

In Nathan Brede's courtroom, Brett Kincaid had not spoken in his own behalf. His expression of "remorse" like his plea of guilty had been communicated by his attorney while the shackled corporal stood mute and staring into space like a dangerous beast brought to bay, and now but a piteous sight.

Zeno had no doubt, Kincaid was guilty. No doubt, Kincaid should be sentenced to prison for a long time.

Voluntary manslaughter was a weak indictment. Fifteen to twenty years meant eligibility for parole in seven years. Zeno knew this, and Zeno was sickened by the knowledge. But Zeno knew not to object publicly: he would not rant for TV cameras like a tormented bear on his hind legs. He would not provide an entertaining spectacle for the insatiable news media.

Yet, as a lawyer, Zeno knew: there remained the prevailing question of the corporal's confession through seven hours of police interrogation, with no lawyer present. (No lawyer because Kincaid had refused a lawyer.) How authentic was this confession? How could its details be corroborated? Had it been coerced? Had there been others who'd participated in an assault upon the victim that had begun at the lake? In the parking lot of the Roebuck Inn?-or had the assault taken place entirely in the Nautauga Preserve, with Brett Kincaid the sole assailant? Zeno had been allowed to view much of the original interview with Kincaid through a TV monitor, at the Beechum County Sheriff's Department, and he'd been allowed to examine the videotapes not all of which were entirely coherent, audible. This experience he would later describe in semi-drunken noir-humor as an experience not unlike seeing his guts dragged out of him, twisted, stabbed and burnt as he observed, if such exquisite torture could be protracted for seven hours and the victim still reasonably conscious.

Yes. Zeno could see that the young man who'd confessed to murdering his daughter was sincerely repentant. You could see that Kincaid was repelled by his own physical being like a rabid creature about to tear at itself with its teeth. But this did not make Corporal Kincaid less guilty in Zeno's eyes. It did not make Zeno hate him less, or feel in any way inclined to forgive.

It had been rumored that Corporal Brett Kincaid had provided information against certain of his fellow platoon-comrades, in Iraq; that he'd participated in an army investigation into atrocities committed by U.S. soldiers against Iraqi citizens; that some or all of his injuries might have been the result of his providing testimony, and that he'd had to be hurriedly dispatched out of his platoon, out of Iraq, to prevent his being killed. None of these rumors was ever substantiated and when Zeno Mayfield tried to discover what had happened, both directly and by way of what Zeno wanted to think was a high-ranking personal contact at the Department of Veteran Affairs in Washington, D.C., he'd been informed that there was no such investigation on record: no charges had been filed against anyone in Corporal Kincaid's platoon.

Meaning-what? That the U.S. Army had buried the investigation, or that there'd never been an investigation? That Corporal Kincaid had been injured by the Iraqi enemy, or by his own comrades? Or both?

AFTER THE INITIAL INTERVIEWS when it had seemed that Cressida was merely missing, and that their public appeals might be of help in finding her, the Mayfields never gave another.

After Evvie Estes contacted them one too many times Zeno told her bluntly No more. We're done with entertaining.

FELT NO DESIRE for his wife, or any woman.

His only desire was for-(he knew: an insipid fantasy)-the restoration of all he'd lost though at the time of his losing it, in July 2005, he'd had but a vague awareness of its vast unfathomable worth; and of his own worth, mirrored in it.

Consoling himself, these solitary evenings when Arlette was "out"-(carefully she'd explained where she was, which volunteer organization, or which women-friends)-with a smudged tumbler of whiskey and The Personal Memoirs of Ulysses S. Grant.

Belatedly he would realize: even Arlette's sickness had been an estrangement between them. An occasion for estrangement.

Where once such a personal, physical crisis would have drawn them together more intimately, as in the intense, emotion-rife days preceding and following the births of their daughters years ago, now the discovery that Arlette "had" cancer was like an elbow in the husband's ribs nudging him aside.

So Zeno felt. All the more reason then in his suspended-terror state to have an occasional (surreptitious, at-home) drink. Just one.

Or maybe, one and a half.

(For who would know?) (Not Arlette in her life ever more tight-scheduled like a cobweb of maniacal precision in which, the husband was given to know, his anxious presence was a detriment and not a blessing.) For from the first discovery of a tiny lump in Arlette's left breast through a sequence of mammograms, CAT scans, biopsy and surgery-the grueling regimen of chemotherapy, radiation, and medication that stretched on for more than six months in the late summer, fall and winter of 2006 to 2007-it hadn't been her husband in whom she'd confided so much as in her sister and other women-friends who'd rallied to her like dolphins in a treacherous sea rallying to one of their own stricken kind.

Zeno was sick with fury anew, at Kincaid. Who'd killed his daughter, and was now killing his wife.

It could not be a coincidence, Zeno thought. That his wife, Cressida's mother, should be diagnosed with cancer approximately a year after Cressida's disappearance.

(Zeno had reason to believe that others, close to Arlette, like her sister Katie Hewitt, thought so, too; but were too tactful to mention it to either of the Mayfields.) The tiny lump "the size of a persimmon seed"-(so Arlette persisted in describing it in the vocabulary of a children's storybook)-seemed to Zeno the way in which the destructive element that had snatched away his daughter had found, in his marriage, another way in.

He'd wanted to take Arlette to Buffalo, to the Roswell Park Cancer Institute. He'd wanted her to be in the care of the very best breast cancer doctors upstate. But Arlette had demurred, wanting to remain close to home. She'd conferred with her women-friends, she'd made a decision to continue with local doctors-surgeon, interventional radiologist, oncologist. "Buffalo is more than two hundred miles away. It would just complicate things. Please, let me handle this in a way that isn't distressful to me."

"But you're my wife! I want the very best for you."

Only reluctantly had Arlette told Zeno her alarming news when he'd questioned her about a "surgical procedure" she was scheduled to have at the Carthage Hospital-Arlette's euphemism for "biopsy."

If she'd wept, if she'd broken down to weep in anyone's arms, it had not been in her husband's arms.

"Weren't you going to tell me? When were you going to tell me?"

"I didn't want to worry you, Zeno. You've been so-you have a tendency to be so-"

"To be so concerned? About my family?"

"Please don't be angry with me, Zeno. You're so often-"

"I'm not angry! I'm surprised, and I'm upset, and I'm disappointed, but-I am not angry."

Seeing that it was all Arlette could do, to keep from stepping back from him.

He knew, in recent months he'd lost his old, Zeno-equanimity. He knew, he was frightening his wife away even as he meant to beckon her to him.

"I didn't see any reason to worry you prematurely, Zeno. If the cyst turned out to be benign, as often they do . . ."

"Of course you should have told me! That's ridiculous, and insulting."

"I-I didn't mean to be insulting . . ."

"You know how news spreads in Carthage. What would people say if they knew that Zeno Mayfield's wife had had a biopsy at the hospital and he hadn't even known?"

Zeno heard Zeno Mayfield's wife. My wife.

Zeno knew, this was not the right thing to say. Not to his wife who'd been so bravely trying to hide her anxiety from him; not to Arlette who loved him, and wanted to protect him. Yet he couldn't seem to stop himself, his hurt was so deep.

"I want to take you to Buffalo, Arlette. We'll make an appointment, we'll drive there-tomorrow. I'll call my doctor-friend Artie Bender, in Buffalo, he can get us an appointment with the very best breast-cancer specialist at Roswell."

"Zeno, no! I can't."

"What do you mean, you can't?"

"I have a surgeon, and an oncologist. I-I like them both very much. I trust them. I've been talking to people, women-friends, who recommend them, and who've gone to them. And Katie likes them, too. You know how critical Katie is . . ."

"Fuck Katie! Katie isn't your husband, I am."

Your husband. I am.