"She's there."

But when we cross the bridge the bench where Ma was sitting is taken up by another family, a big Negro woman with a newborn baby and two boys who just stare at us.

There is a low concrete wall behind the bench, and I take Marty over and lean her up against it. "Don't move," I tell her before climbing up. My sister's face is scrunched up but she obeys. I know what to look fora"Ma's puffy black hairdo, Daddy's maroon baseball cap. But all the colors in the crowda"except for the family sitting on the bench belowa"are pale-pinks and light blues and yellows.

Marty starts to cry.

"We'll find them," I tell her. It doesn't occur to me that they'll find us. People are noticing us, alone together, and this makes me nervous. There's big old Goofy in the distance, and I consider asking him what to do, but Ma says none of the cartoon characters can talk. Anyhow he's kind of scary-looking. Who ever heard of a purple dog? He doesn't even look like a dog.

My sister has stopped sobbing, although tears are still sliding down her face.

"Don't worry, Mar-Mar," I say, hugging her. Though we are only about a year apart I am so much taller, and sometimes we pretend that she is my baby. She's small enough to still fit in the buggy and I used to wheel her around the backyard until Ma told me to stop. My sister sticks her hand into mine again, and we continue walking, away from the bridge, which seems the right thing to do.

Suddenly we're at the teacups againa"I recognize the little pink house where you get your tickets. There's still a line of people in front, but I just keep walking and no one stops us. At the window there's a lady with curly blond hair and a diagonal band across her body, like Girl Scouts. She leans down.

"What? I can't hear you, little girl."

I repeat: "We're looking for our parents."

This causes a commotion. The lady in the booth speaks to someone behind her and then tells us to stay put. Now the people in the front of the line are paying attention to us. One of the mothers with fat arms is saying she's surprised this doesn't happen more often here, kids getting lost. A man in a flowered shirt squats down in front of Marty to offer her a Tootsie Pop. She shakes her head, which I am glad of. The man tells his wife: "Looks just like one of them Japanese dolls, doncha think?"

The lady in the booth comes out and says we should come inside to wait. She puts her fingers, with their long purple nails, on our shoulders, to pull us in.

The booth is dark, with lots of shelves and a table with a big roll of green tickets and some paper napkins and empty paper cups. The other person in the booth, a man with a brown face and a black mustache, points to a couple of stools in the corner and says, "Take a load off!" As we sit down, Marty is still clutching my hand. I shake my own hand until she lets go.

"Don't be a baby," I whisper.

"Okay," says the lady. "Tell me your last name again."

"Wang," I say.

She wrinkles her forehead. "Won? Your name is Won?"

"WANG. Sarah and Martha Wang."

"Okay, Denny, you hear that?"

"Yeah. Don't worry, hons, we'll find who you belong to." The man adjusts his microphone, which I notice for the first time, and leans into it. "ATTENTION ALL PARENTS. WE HAVE TWO LITTLE LOST ORIENTAL GIRLS AT THE TEACUP RIDE. I REPEAT, TWO LITTLE LOST ORIENTAL GIRLS AT THE TEACUP RIDE."

He doesn't say our names. How are Ma and Daddy going to know, unless they hear our names? I look over at my sister. Although she has finally stopped crying, I can tell from the expression on her face that something bad is about to happen.

"That should do it," the man says.

Marry is peeing in her pants, right on the stool, and it's spilling onto the floor.

It's my fault. I forgot to ask her if she needed to go.

The man and the lady both turn around. The man says a bad word.

"You poor little thing," the lady says to Marty. "Don't worry, your mama and papa will come to get you soon." She scrunches up some napkins and walks over to my sister. Marty leans away from her, almost falling off the stool.

"I'm not going to hurt you," the lady says. She looks at the man, who shrugs his shoulders. Then she just tosses the napkins on the floor around my sister's stool, to soak up the pee.

The man leans into the microphone again. "ATTENTION PARENTS. TWO LITTLE LOST ORIENTAL GIRLS AT THE TEACUP RIDE."

The lady goes over to stand at the window and the man ignores us. I think he's just hoping neither of us is going to do anything disgusting again.

Then I hear the lady say: "Hallelujah, I think it's them."

Our parents look very hot. I am surprised to see them. Right away Ma reaches for Marty, who's crying her head off again.

"She wet herself?" Ma asks me, like anyone couldn't tell.

"Sealy," Daddy says. He has a funny expression on his face.

"Okay, okay," says Ma. She says to the lady and man: "Thank you for taking care of them."

"No big deal, I got nieces and nephews," says the lady.

The man makes a grunting noise.

Ma points at me. "I told you watch your sister. Can't you hear? Something wrong with your brain, Sal-lee?"

She takes Marty to the ladies' room to wash her off, and Daddy and I sit down to wait for them on the concrete wall. I'm so thirsty I think I am going to die. I remember I didn't get to finish my orangeade.

Daddy touches the top of my hair and says: "Ouch! What a hothead!" He takes off his baseball cap and puts it on my head. It's sweaty and smelly and way too big but immediately I feel better.

And then I see her.

"Daddy!"

"Ai-yah, what's this?"

"Minnie Mouse. Look, Daddy, right there."

"Mickey Mouse?"

"No, Minnie Mouse. See, in the red dress."

"She's the one you like, huh, Sealy?"

"Yes."

He looks at me and then before I know what's happening my father has lifted me up and I'm sitting on his shoulders, just like the other kids. But Daddy is so tall that together we're taller than anybody else. We march through the crowd to Minnie and then he sets me down, exactly in front of her, so she can't help noticing me. I can't believe it. I stare at her white glovesa"so clean, like Nai-nai'sa"her white stockings in their slender lady legs, and then finally at her big smiling white and black head with its red and white polka-dot bow that matches her dress.

"You're more beautiful than Miss America," I say.

The head tilts toward me like she's going to say something, but then I remember that of course the cartoon characters don't talk. Instead, she bends downa"she's wearing a petticoat, I can hear it rustlea"takes my hand in her gloved one and gently shakes it, as if I were already grown up and we were meeting at a party.

Behind me Daddy makes a sound. It's only many years later that I recognize ita"my father is crying.

Part Three

15.

In the end Ma never carried out her threat and I went to St. Petersburg as planned, two days after my discharge from Willowridge.

During those two days I wandered around the house on Woodside Avenue, trying to convince myself I was normal now, fit to be a citizen of the outside world, although normal was the last thing I felt. Jury-rigged was more like it. The pieces reassembled, and, as Sylvia P. would say, stuck together with glue. A month and a half of medication and group therapy had made me more talkative, but it was an uncensored kind of talkative, the kind that wouldn't wash at a cocktail party, for instance. Still everyonea"Valeric, my group, the MHsa"had agreed that I was ready. And it was true that there were things I could do again, like sit down and read the New Haven Register from front to back, or call Fran in Cambridgea"I thought she sounded a little off, but maybe it was because she was finally sick of my angst.

The house was too damn quiet. My sister was gone againa"this time to Vermont, where an old boyfriend of hers had dropped out of Wall Street to become a carpenter. I avoided my bedroom with all its heavy furniture that was familiar but wrongly placed, like objects in a nightmare. The pink runner on the floor by the bed, which used to lie in the front hall of the house on Coram Drive, was stained forever by my vomit. Our old baroque telephone stand, with its one latticed shelf, was my bed table, mismatched to the simple blond lines of the twin bed that had lost its twin. Most disturbing of all was the wallpapera"enormous abstract brown and beige daisies that had looked to me like deformed children, all those long days I'd lain staring at it. Almost as bad as the apple blossoms on Coram Drive.

I did check the top drawer of the bureau, and the empty vialsa"Valium and Elavila"were still there. I'd taken thirty-six pills in all, for the thirty-six hours my mother had been in labor with me. Kind of a last private joke. And I noticed that someonea"Ma, of coursea"had removed the envelope containing my will, which I'd anchored under the prancing wooden horse.

My first session with Valerie, I'd asked her what was wrong with me.

"You're acutely depressed."

"That's all?"

It had sounded too minor, like the flu. I was sure that whatever I had was causing my internal organs to rota"I could smell it on my breath.

Understand this: at first death had been a mere flirtation, for instance, catching my foot lying hard on the gas pedal at the curve around Lake Whitney, the one that had killed Darcy and her boyfriend.

But then it became a true love affair, my heart was swollen for it, it lay down with me in bed and seeped into my pores while I slept.

I knew it was a sin. I knew that in the West human life was valued above all else, that it would be considered a virtuous act to keep this body of mine alive, no matter how stupid I got. Valerie had already begun talking about a hospital. Facility, she called it. Nothing facile about it, if you'd asked me, except for the people who wouldn't have to deal with you anymore.

I was sorry thinking that Ma would be the one to discover me. She had found her own father's body, face twisted, pillow soaked with the life blood he'd coughed out in his sleep. His favorite, my mother had run into his room every morning, even before the servants came with hot water.

You'd think, given my history, I would have chosen to cut. And I admit I did consider it, standing in front of the mirror in my parents' bathroom, that ghastly fluorescent light illuminating the blue veins in my already scarred left forearm. There was even a package of Daddy's razor blades left in the medicine cabinet. But in the end I chickened out. Although I could imagine the kind of pain from a vein rent clear through, could even imagine existing through it, I simply did not want to die in that kind of agony. It would have to be sleep.

I chose the day, a Saturday, when my mother would be away at a Smith luncheon in New York City. The night before I made my will, which was simple. When I was finished I saw that my handwriting was illegible so I did it all over again in big block letters, simplifying as much as possible.

FRANa"ART. MARTYa"EVERYTHING ELSE. CREMATE. They'd figure it out.

Then I opened the bottles and spilled the pills onto the scarf Aunty Mabel had embroidered for my sixteenth birthday. Fuchsia satin, with clumps of white kittens in the corners. Counting, I had trouble focusing, the color contrast was so vibrant, the tablets so tiny. I pushed the pills into the middle of the scarf and knotted it up into a bundle. Someone long ago had taught me to do that, I didn't remember who.

That night I was too keyed up to sleep, still staring at the ceiling when Ma leaned into my bedroom. She had on a brown tweed suit with a yellow and red scarf wrapped around her throat and her favorite earrings, Nai-nai's black pearls.

"Sure you don't want to come to New York with me?" she asked. "You can go to museum. Or I give you my Bloomingdale's charge card."

"No."

"I'll be back before six. If you need money it's on top of the radio in the kitchen."

I waited for the front door to slam, the gust of the taxi making the turn down the hill. Then I lay for a while more, listening to the silence of the house, punctuated by random bird and squirrel noise from the backyard. From a crack under the window shade, I could see that the day was overcast, and for this I was thankful.

I took a shower, out of habit I guess, and afterward went into Marty's room. Over the bedpost was flung a crimson feather boa. Somewhere there was a Polaroid of my sister in costume: gold-painted eyelids, black unitard, spike heels, and that boa draped across her breasts. I got into the bed and reached up and pulled it down, wrapping the ends of it around my face, inhaling that scent of my sister, a smell that I could distinguish from a thousand other people's in the dark.

Then I went downstairs, only glancing into the half-open door of my parents' bedroom, the double bed immaculately made with its blue-and-white-striped spread, the low bureau cluttered with straw trays of cosmetics and jewelry and a couple of the Chinese movie star magazines my mother still read. My parents' wedding picture in its silver frame was propped in the comer.

In the kitchen, Ma's tea mug filled with swollen green leaves sat on the table, still warm to the touch. There was one more thing I needed to do. I slipped my feet into the old sneakers my mother kept by the back door for gardeninga"they were so small my heels hung over the backsa"and then went out and climbed onto the curb of the driveway. Standing there I could see my breath, but the cold seemed to just lie on my skin, like snow on the ground, without penetrating it.

I'd come out to say good-bye to my favorite tree, the black walnut. It stood stark and plain at the bottom of the hill, the dark brown trunk rising straight for fifteen feet until the limbs began reaching upward.

I'd wanted that image to be the last thing branded into my brain in this world, but now, seven weeks later, I was standing at the top of the hill again, watching the shadow play of pale green flower and unfolding leaf in an angle of sun. In the tortured narcissism of my attempted suicide and its aftermath it had not occurred to me that this tree would bud and bloom, that in fact things would simply continue.

16.

Right before takeoff I had this sudden urge to stand up in the aisle and announce that I was fresh out of the loony bin, what did everyone think about that?

But how perfectly easy it was, after all, to appear normal: just stay in your seat and keep your mouth shut. I thought that if Mel had been in my place he'd have been practicing his charm on the flight attendant, trying to cadge a drink out of her.

We'd said our good-byes out by the lake, after breakfast on the day my mother came to pick me up. He gave me his poetry anthology and told me he'd marked certain poems for me.

"But you're always reading that book."

"Consider it a loan. That way I'll be sure of seeing vou again."

The sun was tipping the wavelets gold, too dazzling to focus on. The ducks, who didn't seem to care that this was a mental hospital, had glided hopefully to shore as they did anytime anyone passed. I dug into the pocket of my jacket and found the remains of a packet of oyster crackers, which I tossed out onto the water.

"Ciao, Club Willowridge," Mel said. I laughed.

"We never got to play tennis."

"You'll play in Florida." He studied me, as if searching for something in particular. "You get better down there, you hear? At least get a tan."

"Visit me," I said impulsively.

He scrubbed at the wet grass with the tip of his sneaker. "I don't have the dough."

"We'll talk about it."

"Sure."

"I don't have the number with me, but they're listed. Richard Ding. I'm sure they're the only Ding in St. Petersburg."

"Okay." Mel smiled and reached behind me to slide the elastic out of my ponytail so that my hair fell down around my face. Then he leaned forward and gave me the lightest of kisses on the mouth.