"Still in the house."

"And my mother?"

"She's there, too, answering questions. Do you feel up to talking to us, hon?"

"I want to see my mother."

"In a minute. After we talk."

A few reporters rolled in. I didn't understand that. A flashbulb popped, the first blinding shot in what became a barrage. Questions splashed over me like water bursting from a hose. I ducked my head, but the flood of noise and the flashes didn't stop.

"Let's go inside." The detective hurried me along until he realized that I limped. Then he gentled me toward the front door.

The living room, dining alcove, and kitchen were churning with cops, the rescue squad, a priest, a doctor, a man with a measuring tape, and a guy dusting for prints. I begged them to be careful. If anybody broke Mom's knickknacks, there'd be h.e.l.l to pay.

The detective led me over to the new sofa. Covered in clear plastic, it was off-limits to Maury and me. When we watched TV, Mom made us sit on the floor. The sofa was reserved for grownups. I didn't want to have to explain this to the detective. So I sat down and hoped Mom wouldn't find out. The detective settled in beside me, and the plastic gave an embarra.s.sing squeak under his b.u.t.t.

"Did they fight a lot?" he asked. "You can trust me, hon. Just tell the truth, and help us help your family."

Maury and I had been raised as close-mouthed as a Mafia clan. Whenever bookies or collection agents pounded at the door, we knew not to answer questions and never to blab about Dad's whereabouts. For years he'd been in and out of hiding. So it shocked me to hear the detective say, "Your mother's already told us plenty."

"Like what?"

"Like they fought a lot."

That described Mom and Dad to a T. But I argued, "They don't fight any more than other married couples."

"I'm not talking about your parents. It's your brother. He and your father didn't get along, did they?"

I didn't know what to say. With Dad and Maury, the fighting was all one way. Dad just didn't have any patience with Maury's quirks.

The detective removed his hat. His large-pored face became blurry as my eyes teared up. "Did your brother threaten your father?" he asked. "Did he say he meant to hurt him?"

"Maury never hurt anybody. He hated it when anyone hurt an animal, even a turtle. He doesn't like to be touched, himself, and he doesn't touch other people. Whenever Dad spanked him-"

"Maury'd get mad?"

"No, he'd fall into one of his fits."

"And do what?"

"He'd moan on the floor and rock back and forth."

"What your mother tells us, he did a lot worse today. He stabbed your father."

I shook my head no.

"He confessed."

I started screaming. Not saying words, just screeching. That brought Mom out of the bedroom. Blank-faced and slow, she led a procession of detectives down the stairs. There was blood on her hands, on her arms and the front of her blouse. She looked like the butcher at Safeway, gory in his ap.r.o.n behind the meat counter. When she came near, I cringed and kept screaming. She hugged me, and the blood was hot to touch.

Only her eyes had expression. Compared to her empty face, they had every possible emotion in them, all at the same time. I was put in mind of staring out a window. On top of what you see through it, there's your own image in the gla.s.s and a reflection from the wall behind you where a mirror shows the scene backward, and on and on. That's how full Mom's eyes were with panic and pain and sadness and anger.

"Is Dad dead?" I asked.

She nodded.

"Maury killed him?"

She cut her eyes to the detectives. She didn't want to talk in front of them. "I gotta go to the police station and be with your brother."

"Let me go with you."

"You have to stay and look after the house. Go up to your room and wait there."

"How can I look after the house up there?"

"Don't argue, Candy. Just do what I tell you."

"One of my men'll keep her company," a detective said.

"She'd rather be alone. Wouldn't you?" Mom prompted.

I had no choice but to trudge upstairs and change out of the clothes she had bloodied. I soaked my birthday dress in the bathroom sink, and bloodstains swam off the wool like stingers from a sea nettle. The sight of it made me sick to my stomach. But even sticking a finger down my throat, I couldn't bring anything up.

I sat beside the window in my bedroom, hidden by a curtain. The crowd on the sidewalk grew bigger, and reporters interviewed neighbors and snapped pictures of the house. Everybody pressed against the yellow crime scene tape and gawked. n.o.body wanted to miss a thing.

I felt ... After all these years I'd just be guessing what I felt at fifteen. I'm positive self-pity topped the list. My birthday was ruined and so was my dress. The idea that my family and my life were ruined followed next. Then shame pushed everything else aside.

It was like the summer I caught polio and came home from the hospital to find people staring and pointing and whispering. Now it seemed I had contracted another disease and if I didn't agree to quarantine myself, people would do it to me.

Later I sobbed to Mom that I felt scalded with shame. "Don't be such a sissy," she said. "You make it sound like you've been peed on."

Which was exactly how I felt.

After the rescue squad carried Dad's body out in a black bag and the crowd drifted away, it hit me how much I'd miss him. Because of my bad leg it had been years since I'd run and fetched him a beer. Now I'd never do it again, nor climb onto his lap while he blew smoke rings through my hair.

After a few hours, I disobeyed Mom and left the bedroom. Downstairs, the living room and dining alcove had a scattering of gum wrappers, cigarette b.u.t.ts, and scorched matchsticks. Because the police hadn't cleaned up after themselves, I did it, same as I did every time Mom and Dad stumbled off to bed leaving the house a mess.

I postponed going into the kitchen till last. I was afraid there'd be blood wall to wall. But when I pushed through the swinging door, things were spic and span, every plate, gla.s.s, and piece of silverware in its place. Only the butcher knife was missing.

I crossed the gummy linoleum floor in my bare feet. I got no spooky feeling that somebody had died here. That was the creepiest thing-the sense that nothing seemed to have happened, yet everything had changed.

I pulled at the refrigerator door, and the rubber seals yielded with a moist pop. This was forbidden territory. Maury and I weren't supposed to eat between meals. Snacks and soft drinks were against the rules except on Sat.u.r.day night. Since I was sinning already, I grabbed a beer instead of a c.o.ke. If there had been a pack of Dad's Camels handy, I'd have fired one up and blown smoke rings through my own hair.

With a second bottle of beer, then a third, a nice glow took hold. This, I decided, was how I'd survive. I'd sit tight and I'd stay tight. The beer pooled deep inside, freezing me at the center so that I felt less and less, then nothing.

By the time Mom came home, I had pa.s.sed out with my cheek glued to the kitchen table. It was after midnight, and she must have known I was exhausted. But that didn't stop her from shaking me awake and yakking into the wee hours.

The fight with Dad had started over nothing, she said. "Who knows what riled him? Some nights you needed to throw a net over that man. Not that it was anything Maury hadn't heard before. Just the typical hollering and cussing. But it upset Maury and he grabbed the butcher knife and stuck it in Dad's belly."

I heard her through a haze of beer, and as she talked on, the room started sliding under me. Some of the words didn't stick. I didn't want to picture Maury stabbing Dad. I didn't want to know what he confessed to the police, or how he acted when they locked him in solitary confinement for his own safety.

Maury probably preferred that to a cell full of prisoners. He liked to be alone in little places. I imagined him stretched out on his cot, like in the bathtub, his hands rubbing the walls for rea.s.surance. Then tomorrow morning some smart person-a policeman, a lawyer, a priest-would show up and declare that he couldn't be held accountable.

But Mom soon busted that pipe dream. "What we have to pray for," she said, "is they give him life, not the death penalty."

"He's just thirteen."

"They booked him as an adult. It's a capital crime. If they prove premeditation-"

"Maury never premeditated anything."

"That's the point. Anybody asks, you tell them he wasn't capable of planning ahead. That's our best hope."

But n.o.body asked me that or anything else. n.o.body spoke to me at all except Dad's relatives, who carped out loud, never caring who was in earshot. Heavy drinkers and h.e.l.l-raisers, railroad men from Pennsylvania and oil roustabouts from Louisiana, they made it a point to take me aside and tell me that Dad had married a hardhearted woman. It went unsaid that she had produced damaged kids, one sick in the head, the other crippled in body. But it was clear they believed he had had less luck in life than at cards. Now we simply had to hope that he had gone to a better place.

Mom never asked me anything either. Not how I felt nor whether there was something she could do for me. She expected me to do for her. I became her dogsbody-honestly, that's the term she used. I prayed Dad's death would bring peace at home. But the battle between husband and wife turned into a mother-daughter donnybrook, and it took her no time to beat me down.

The worst of it was I had to go through this without Maury, who loved me like no one else in the family. With him in jail and me on my own, a hunger took hold that was as raw and stinging as a skinned knee. Nothing eased that ache until Quinn was born, and I had an infant to fawn over. I dressed and undressed him, bathed him and pushed him in his stroller. He was a doll, my living doll, and all I had to love until Lawrence happened into my life.

Still, I can't complain that Mom had it easier than me. She wore herself to a nub working for Maury's release. And when the public defender convinced her that that wouldn't happen and that he should plead guilty to second-degree murder in exchange for a life sentence, she didn't despair. Roaming the halls of the County Service Building, she cornered lawyers and begged them to do his appeal for free. She wrote pet.i.tions to shrinks and social workers pleading for help. Driven by a love hard to separate from lunacy, she paid out of her Safeway salary for tests that were supposed to prove his diminished responsibility. Finally she managed to have him transferred to the Patuxent Inst.i.tute for Defective Delinquents, where he got psychological treatment and a chance for parole once he was no longer a threat to society and himself.

After that, I expected Mom to move on with her life and move out of the house where the murder was committed. But she fixed her course and wouldn't swerve from it till her son was free. I don't know where she drew the strength.

People insisted I was strong too because I stuck by Mom. But I knew better. I knew I stayed with her out of weakness.

"Candy!" she calls from upstairs. "Candy, where the h.e.l.l are you? I've been hollering for five minutes."

Afraid that she's fallen and hurt herself, I scramble from the rocking chair and risk my neck on the stairs, climbing them two at a time. Dust rollers nestle in every corner of the second floor. I'd lay money she hasn't vacuumed or changed her sheets since last summer. She's living in her own house like a bag lady in the streets.

The door to her bedroom is shut. She shouts again, summoning me to the bedroom that used to be mine. Nothing's left of me here, and Mom calls it "the library." It has a shelf full of paperbacks, some of them from when Quinn was in college. Eventually, Mom read them herself, dead set on keeping pace with her son. But I have to say that where they fed his mind, all those books seemed to feed her mouth. Even at her age, n.o.body can outtalk her. There's also a card table where she wrote letters to Maury in prison, then later to Quinn in London. Now that her dealings with the boys have dwindled to phone calls-about once a year from Maury and twice a month from Quinn-the room has become a catchall for every type of keepsake.

Like I feared, Mom's down on the floor, propped up by a bony elbow. "My G.o.d, what's wrong?" I exclaim.

"Not a d.a.m.n thing except you fell asleep on me."

"Lemme help you up."

"I'm okay where I am." She gives a dismissive flick of the fingers that hold a lighted cigarette. "Sit down."

I'm in my church clothes and the carpet's filthy. Still, I do as I'm told. I know there'll be trouble standing up again. Mother and daughter, we'll be like a couple of turtles flipped on their sh.e.l.ls, struggling to turn upright.

"I've saved some stuff in the cedar chest," she says, "in case Quinn wants it."

I doubt he wants anything, not from her, not from me. I doubt we cross his mind except as burdens. In my low moments, I suspect Quinn cracks jokes to his English friends about his threadbare Irish family. I know he's honed a pitch-perfect impression of Maury, something resembling Dustin Hoffman in Rain Man Rain Man. I've laughed at it myself so I'm as guilty as he is. I just hope he never imitates my limp.

Mom scoots around on her scrawny shanks and leans against the cedar chest. There are photos in it, too, and she hands me a stack of them. Then she tilts her head like a sword swallower and drags on the Kent, letting the poison stab deep into her lungs. After a lifetime of cigarette smoke, they must be as black and wrinkled as leather handbags.

"How long is it," she asks, "since Quinn brought that woman to visit?"

"About ten years." I don't mention his more recent visits when Mom refused to open the door for him. She warned him by phone she didn't want to be seen in her sorry shape. Still, he a.s.sumed if he stopped by the house she wouldn't turn him away. He a.s.sumed wrong! Insulted, he threatened to stop sending her money. But he cooled off and never missed a monthly check.

"What a stuck-up t.w.a.t she was," Mom says. "She eyeballed my furniture like her skinny a.s.s was too precious to sit on it. Everything she ate, even soup, she worried she had food stuck between her teeth and trotted off to the bathroom-the loo!-to check in the mirror."

Mom laughs, then coughs, then fights to catch her breath. "And that nose of hers, I'd love to have it full of nickels."

"I thought she was very elegant and aristocratic."

"Aristocratic my a.s.s. I bet she knew some tricks in bed. Otherwise Quinn wouldn't have been with her. You believe what the nuns taught you about love, and how it depends on holding hands and looking into each other's eyes. But you'll learn soon enough if you stay with Leonard that it comes down to what you do in bed. Your father claimed that's how he wanted to die-during s.e.x. But what about the woman? That'd put a gal off love for good."

"Mom, please!"

"He'd stagger home drunk after winning at cards and want to rush me before I was ready. I liked it better when he lost. He was slower and grateful then."

"Save this for Quinn."

"Don't think for one minute I didn't teach him the score. I hope he was listening. Doesn't look like you or Maury'll give me grandkids. So it's up to Quinn to make sure the family doesn't die off."

"Does that really matter?"

"d.a.m.n right. What mother doesn't like the line to go on?"

I riffle snapshots of Quinn that show his career with the chronology scrambled. One moment he's onstage at the Old Vic with Laurence Olivier, the next he's dressed as one of the magi for a grade school Christmas pageant. In the oldest pictures Mom's always hovering nearby. Whenever she wasn't spanking him, she spoiled him rotten. Soon as he started talking-and that was early-she never punished him for pretending to be something he's not. From the word go, they were in it together. But unlike Maury or me, he gave her as good as he got. He was her favorite opponent, and she loved tangling with him.

She believed it would always be the two of them costarring in a script she wrote. But early on he brushed her off. I'm not talking about when he flew to Europe and never came back. I mean as a kid, he was already aiming for a wider audience.

What did she expect? Even before he was born, Mom made him the center of attention. She paraded around pushing her belly forward, like a man proud of his chest, and invited total strangers to touch it. Soon as he was weaned, she brought him to Patuxent Inst.i.tute with us on visiting days, and let him fill up the silence. He'd jabber away, entertaining everybody-guards, inmates, other families. On the way home, Mom claimed to be too tired to drive, and since I had my learner's permit, I'd take the wheel while she'd lie in the backseat crooning to Quinn. d.a.m.ned if he didn't croon back to her, the two of them in harmony. I sometimes wondered whether this, not seeing Maury, was the point of the trip.

For a kid who was such a charmer, Quinn never had many friends, and as a teenager he didn't date girls. As Mom put it, he was too smart to knock up some local tramp and waste his life like so many neighborhood boys did. She thought he was saving himself for the right woman. But I believe he was waiting for better opportunities.

I once cut loose with both barrels and told him that if it wasn't bad enough having a brother with Asperger's syndrome, I had a second one that was an Iceberger. But I really don't blame Quinn for his calculating nature. If I had his brains and ability, his good looks and good luck, I'd have done the same thing he did-get away at the first chance.

"Kids," Mom mutters half aloud. "I used to figure nothing pays off like kids. Now I'm not sure. Every time Quinn calls, he sounds so bored."

"It's five hours later in London. Maybe he's tired and ready for bed."

"Nah. He's just tired of me."

I toss aside a publicity still of Quinn in a Shakespearean costume that's as flouncy as a 1940s c.o.c.ktail dress, and she picks it up. "Kids'll drive you crazy. Life'll make you nuts. After a while it all wears you down. It started for me when your father was in the army. During the war I virtually lived in the bathroom."

I a.s.sume she means she was sick to her stomach for fear that her husband would die in battle. But she says, "There were blackouts every night. The whole city of Washington was scared the j.a.ps or the Germans would bomb us. When the siren wailed, I'd take shelter in the bathroom until the all-clear signal. I tacked tar paper over the window so I could leave on the bulb over the sink and read a book. I spent so many hours on the john smoking and reading, it's a wonder I didn't die of hemorrhoids. Sometimes I feel like I'm still holed up in that one bitty room, shut off from the world."

What am I supposed to say? Get out more often? Join a club? Take up a hobby?

She stares at the picture of Quinn in the c.o.c.ktail dress. "Who are you?" she asks. "Where did you come from?" Her voice grows shaky and she starts to sob. "G.o.d knows, I did my best. I loved Quinn like all my children. Now he hates me."