"Maybe."

"Or anywhere else you want."

Slowly, he turned his head and looked at me.

"Josie," he said. "Little sister. Quit trying to make me feel better."

She came home that night, holding two shopping bags in each hand. A blood-colored scarf edged in black embroidery was wrapped jauntily around her neck. The scarf blazed against her new dark hair. One of the bags held a bottle of champagne, already chilled, and a bottle of pear brandy. "A going-away party," she said gaily, "for all three of us, and if we don't all set off with hangovers tomorrow I'll turn in my Holly Hostess badge and join a leper colony." She dropped the bags on the island in the kitchen and looked around. Her eyes skipped nervously over my brother, who was standing in a corner of the kitchen, watching her sullenly.

"I went to see my decorator today," she said, starting to dig around in the shopping bags. She pulled out plastic bags of tomatoes and garlic and boxes of pasta. "I think I'm going to have this place redone, get rid of all this d.a.m.n white. Andre has some beautiful tapestries in his show room. I'm thinking reds and purples, maybe some indigo." She gave us a dazzling smile. "Doesn't that sound gorgeous? You'll have to come back for a visit when it's done."

Jack pointed at the two bottles on the counter. "What are we supposed to do with these?"

"First, open them," she said. "Then, drink them."

"Chick drinks," Jack said as Lily poured generous shots of brandy into three wine gla.s.ses and topped them off with champagne.

Now he looked at her intently. She didn't seem to notice.

"A festive drink for a festive evening." She handed us our gla.s.ses with a flourish. "Voila. Mimosa a la Lily. Now, what should we drink to?"

Jack said, "Whatever you want."

"To the future, then," she said, and we drank.

Once you've decided to tell the truth, it's hard not to qualify it. The facts are the easy part. The sky is blue. Fire is hot. He hit her. The problem is that it's so often tempting to qualify those facts: It sounds worse than it was. It sounds terrible when I say it like that. Or there's the other way out: rationalization as absolution. It was awful, I shouldn't have done it. I wasn't thinking. You have to understand how I was feeling, what I'd been through.

Either way: I didn't do it. But I didn't stop him.

We were drunk. Something different.

Lily and I were each stretched out on one of her two white couches, laughing. I told myself that it was all a sham, that I was only acting cheerful, but the truth was that this was the last night that I would ever spend in Lily's apartment. We would leave the next morning; I didn't know where we would go, but it would be somewhere else. That was enough for now.

Jack brooded in the background. Once, while Lily was in the bathroom, he came to me and let his head drop into my lap, whining, "I hate her. I hate her. I hate her." He sounded like a child. I wondered why leaving Lily was so different than leaving Raeburn or Becka had been, but she came back into the room before I could ask him.

Lily told us a story about a friend of hers who had been cheated by every tour guide and shopkeeper in Athens. By the third time the friend paid fifty dollars for a ten-minute cab ride, I was laughing, and so was Lily. Next to me on the couch I felt Jack grow more and more rigid until finally he said, "For the love of Christ, would the two of you please shut up."

Lily fixed him with a pitying gaze and said, "So very, very grouchy."

In response, Jack jumped to his feet and threw his full gla.s.s of champagne at Lily's pure white wall, leaving an ugly wet splotch.

Lily's eyes widened and she laughed. Her laugh was high and uneasy. I laughed, too-I couldn't help it. His gesture was so melodramatic and self-indulgent and I was giddy with alcohol and fever and nervous tension. When Jack walked around to the back of the couch and stepped on the stem of the gla.s.s, it snapped with a noise like a tree branch breaking and I giggled again.

"f.u.c.k both of you," he said.

Lily beamed up at him drunkenly. "But darling, you already have."

Time froze. Across the room Jack was looking at Lily with new eyes, ablaze with green fire. I felt as though one of the walls of the room had collapsed, like the bombed buildings in war photos, with the inhabitants' lives exposed: this is how they lived, this is what they ate, this is how they loved.

Her eyes glittering, she looked at Jack, who was standing between the couch and the wall, then at me. "I'm right, aren't I?" She clapped her hands and laughed wildly. "I knew it. I knew it! Carmichael had his suspicions, and I knew, of course I knew, but I didn't know."

"Lily," Jack said. His voice was low and dangerous.

She jumped to her feet. Her eyes shone. "Oh, I'm not judging. I think it's kind of romantic. A little sick, maybe, but who isn't a little sick sometimes?"

"Lily," I said. I thought that I should probably put myself between her and Jack, but I couldn't make my feet move, and in addition to the alcohol and the fever and the fear, there was a burgeoning excitement in me that was a little terrifying. I saw Jack move toward her.

Lily kept talking.

"How long?" she said. She had raised herself up and was half sitting, half standing, with one knee bent under her and her body twisted around to face Jack over the high plush back of the couch. It was a childish, gleeful pose, as if she were too excited to sit all the way down. "I bet you were kids when you started. It's like one of those British novels. Kids in those books are always f.u.c.king each other. Was it like that?"

I saw my brother reach over the back of the couch and put his hands on Lily's shoulders. He told me later that he only meant to push her down, to make her shut up, but then she said, "To tell you the truth, those books always kind of turned me on," and Jack's hands moved so quickly that I saw only a blur. One hand went over her eyes and the other over her mouth, and with a mighty jerk he pulled her by her head over the back of the couch. Her dark red lips opened to cry out once, and then I couldn't see her anymore.

Jack had one of the heavy gla.s.s vases from the side table in his hand and I saw his arm move downward fast, once, twice, three times. By the time I made it to the other side of the couch Lily was lying crumpled on the floor. Her blood was mixing with the water on the floor and there were pale blue lilies and deep red liquid everywhere. It was too late.

We put her in the coat closet. Neither of us could think with her lying there like that. Then we cleaned up the blood and the gla.s.s, changed our clothes, and threw the ones we had been wearing into the incinerator. The clothes that we put on were our old clothes from Janesville, which I had been keeping in plastic bags on my closet floor. Just in case.

We did all of this silently, speaking only when it was absolutely necessary. It was like cleaning the house in the old days, after a week of tearing it apart: see what has to be done, do it.

Her foot-I see it-got her?-no, wait- Jack and I worked as if we were one person.

When it was done, we collapsed onto Lily's big bed and slept in the same clothes we'd worn when we'd fled our father together. We slept holding hands.

When I woke up the next morning, my hand felt like it was on fire. Jack asked me if I thought I'd better see a doctor.

I was too tired to dissemble. "I don't know," I said.

He held my hot hand and felt gently around the wound. "It looks bad. Should I take you to a doctor?" he asked again. I was having trouble standing, so we went to the emergency room. The waiting room had the same hard plastic chairs as the bus station we'd waited in during the long trip to New York. It all began to seem unreal, the chairs and the waiting and the dead girl at home in the closet. My mind drifted and I let myself imagine that we were still on that trip. We still had all the long months in the city ahead of us. There was still time.

10.

THE DOCTOR TOOK ONE LOOK at my arm and said, "That doesn't look good. We'll have to admit you for that." I told the admitting nurse that my name was Lily Carter and that no, I didn't have any health insurance. I gave them her address. The nurse checked a box on a form. "Sign here," she said tersely.

They put me in a bed and plugged an IV into my arm. A female nurse with immense hips and a flat, pasty face was making adjustments to the IV drip. Jack sat beside the bed.

There was another bed in the room. The girl in the bed was a few years older than I was and looked far sicker. The only sounds she made were her raspy breathing and her thick cough.

"I can only stay for a while," Jack said. "I have to think."

The hospital was anonymous and rea.s.suring. The clean white sheets, the impersonal nightgown, and the scentless pillow were soft and thin with use. Even the pain and stiffness in my arm were welcome: a tangible problem that was being countered by a tangible solution, the saline spiked with antibiotics that was slowly dripping into my arm. It was comforting, somehow. Everybody seemed to know exactly where they should be and what they should be doing. The doctors came in on schedule, asked the same questions, made-presumably-the same notes. The thin doctor with the gleaming scalp was the one I liked best. He was the one who talked to me about rabies, and how they were going to have to treat me as if I was infected unless I could remember where I'd gotten my ferret bite.

I found this amusing. "Are there ferret control police?" I said. "A ferret elimination task force, perhaps?" It was my second day in the hospital. Tepid Josie Raeburn no longer, I had become Lily Carter, and I was the life of the party.

The doctor smiled a perfunctory professional smile. "If we can talk to the owner of the ferret-if it's been vaccinated or if we can have it tested for rabies-then we can a.s.sume that you're safe. Otherwise, we have to treat you as if you're infected."

He had explained to me that the rabies treatment would involve six extraordinarily expensive shots in four weeks. I saw no reason to be concerned about the cost; after all, since when had Lily Carter ever worried about money? "How do you test it for rabies?"

"We don't," he answered. "Animal Control does. This isn't really my area of expertise." He sneaked a look at his watch. "But I think they just observe it for a while. Make sure it doesn't act strange."

"Really? I thought they cut off its head."

He ran his hand over the shiny skin where his hair used to be, a tired, for-G.o.d's-sake gesture that made me a little sorry I was teasing him. "Maybe they do, if they seem sick. I don't really know."

An unfamiliar nurse came in to check on the girl next to me, putting a thermometer in her mouth. I said, "If I act strange, will you cut off my head?" The nurse glanced at us as she left, her eyes curious. The doctor grinned wryly.

"No, Alice, we're not going to chop off your head," he said.

"My name's not Alice."

"Off with her head," he said. "Get it? Alice in Wonderland," and when I still didn't react, "The children's book. Down the rabbit hole? "

"I never read it. I didn't know it was about decapitation."

"You've never read Alice in Wonderland." It was somewhere between a statement and a question, and I shook my head. He rolled his eyes, looking a little more human, and said, "What is the world coming to?" as he left.

They gave me the first rabies shots anyway: one in the arm and another in my right hand, where the bite was. The girl in the next bed lay there, her breathing still labored. She never looked at any of the doctors and nurses coming and going from the room, but stared straight ahead, feverish and unseeing. Her eyes were burning hollows in her face.

Later, the nurse returned to change the bag on my IV. She checked the tape holding the needle in the back of my hand. Reaching across and picking up my hand, she said, "Didn't they wash your hands when they admitted you? Your fingernails are filthy."

The dark crust underneath my fingernails was mostly Lily's blood. I shrugged.

The nurse leaned down to get a closer look at my nails. "That looks like blood," she said. "Is it blood?"

"I bled a lot when the ferret bit me," I said and held up my bad hand. "I can't clean it with my hand like this."

She grinned, friendly now. "I wouldn't worry too much about it. I haven't lost a patient yet to dirty fingernails."

She left and the wheezing girl and I lay there like two dolls forgotten under a bed. I pretended it was a game: the first one to move lost.

When the balding doctor showed up again, there was no hint of his wry grin. "Boyfriend been by today?"

He meant Jack. "Later," I said. "He just called."

"Good," the doctor said and pulled up a chair next to my bed.

"You've come to chop off my head, after all," I said.

"Not exactly. I've got some news for you."

"You're letting me go." My hand felt much better. The swelling had gone down and it no longer hurt to move it.

"Soon." He was studying my chart. "Lily, when was your last period?"

I stared at him. "You're joking."

"I'm afraid not," the doctor said. "How old are you, Lily?"

"Eighteen." I would be eighteen in January. Jack had warned me to tell them I already was so that there wouldn't be any questions about the hospital forms.

He was watching me carefully. "You seem surprised. Have you been using birth control?"

I didn't answer.

He smiled. It was a gentle smile, and kind, but there was anger there, too. "Then why are you surprised?"

I pinched a piece of the industrial bedsheet with the fingers of my good hand, leaving a crease, and then rubbed the crease smooth again. The giddy pseudo-Lily vanished; Josie was back, limp and exhausted and only able to function because of the plastic tube snaking into her arm. The last person who slept in these sheets, I thought, was probably a good person. Sick, but healthy. In my head, a voice said: We're different than the rest of them.

"You must think I'm pretty stupid," I said. The words tasted bitter on my lips.

The doctor sighed. "That's not at all the sense I get. Although I don't quite know what to make of a kid that's never read Alice in Wonderland." He cleared his throat. "Which reminds me, I picked this up for you at the gift shop. Thought it might cheer you up." He handed me a brightly colored paperback with a little girl in an ap.r.o.n on the cover. There was a formal, absent look on her face that I liked. I turned the book over in my hands, smelled the spicy, wholesome scent of its pages, and thought, I don't deserve this.

"Is that what I am?" I said. "A kid?"

"Not a kid," he said awkwardly. "Young, maybe. Although," he looked at me carefully, "I don't imagine you feel very young at the moment."

"You don't know the half of it."

"I imagine not." Then there were a few moments of silence as we both waited for something else to happen: the gawky doctor with his hands stuffed in his pockets, me lying sh.e.l.lshocked on the bed, the book in my lap and the girl on its cover staring impa.s.sively up at me.

"Thank you for the book," I said. "I'll tell you where the ferrets are, if you want."

"It's okay," he said. "But you need to think about what you want to do. Maybe your parents can help you." The expression on my face must have discouraged him, because he sighed again and said, "Well, talk to your boyfriend when he gets here. I'll be back later. Okay?"

"Okay," I said.

A few minutes later, the wide-hipped nurse came in with a lunch tray. "Poor dear," she said. "Well, it's a life lesson. It'll all turn out all right, though, don't you worry. Nature usually has her way in the end."

I stared at the unappetizing food on the tray. A plain chicken breast, mushy peas, dry rice. Suddenly I wanted to stuff it down the nurse's throat. I could practically hear the noises she'd make, see her face turning purple as she choked to death.

No. That wasn't me. I shut my eyes to make the image go away and said, "Yeah, well, nature has a pretty sick sense of humor."

Time pa.s.sed. I spent most of it reading Alice in Wonderland, and reflecting with cynical amus.e.m.e.nt on all of the bottles I'd sipped from in my time, none of which had been labeled DRINK ME and none of which had succeeded in turning me into anyone other than the person that I was. Eventually I heard the lively jumble of voices in the hallway outside that meant that the day nurses were leaving and the night shift was coming on. The night nurse that I knew best was skinny, with wispy gray hair and surprisingly strong arms. I was waiting for her to come in when the nurse who had changed my IV bag appeared in the door. She was wearing a black leather jacket over her purple uniform and carrying a worn denim bag.

"Hey." She sat down on the edge of my bed without asking.

"Hi," I said, confused.

"You want me to do your nails?" she asked, taking a small zippered case out of her bag.

"What?"