"Do you remember the time," Mara wrote on, when I turned eight and wnted to have a birthday party at the rodeo that came to town?

My parents said no. They said a mdeo porty wasn't right for a girl, and the more I argued, the angrier they grew, but l wasn t giving in I spent my eighth birthday alone in my room, and they let me sit there.

I kept thinking that if they loved me, they'd come get me, but they didn't, and then when I finally came out they told me know how much I had disappointed them.

I did that a lot, I guess. I still do. Next week is Dad's seventy-fifth birthday which dated the letter to three years earlier, Paige realized, and read on, They're giving him a party. I wouldn't have known about it if Chip's wife, Bonnie, hadn t called and said that the boys talked with my mother and they all agreed that I ought to be there. When I mentioned a gift, Bonnie said that the best one I could bring my dad was a son-inAaw. She said it with a laugh, but I knew she wasn't kidding. They all keep hoping that I'll Turn up with a husband and a pack of kids, and buy a house right down the street just like Johnny and Chip did, but l won t. I can t.

What's wrong with being a doctor? Most people think it's a noble pmfession, but every time I think of it, really stop and think of it in the overull scheme of life, I feel guilty.

Okay, so my dad had an ear infection that was misdiagnosed long enough for him to lose hearing in that ear. So my mom would have had l another girl after me if the doctor had gotten to the hospital in time to unwind the umbilical cord from her neck. Does that mean all doctors are bad?

I wonder what another girl in the family would have been like.

Probably just like they wanted me to be. Maybe they'd have stopped harping on me if they'd had her. Then again, maybe not. I could never be the invisible type, though for the longest time, I tried. I steered clear of them all and just went about my own business, but I annoyed them doing that, too.

Your life is so different from mine. I always envied you that. You make people happy, and that makes you happy. You may not have a fancy degree, butyou feel satisfied with your life.

Me, I can't seem to keep things together, not the things that matter most I do so much, and still I fail.

Pained, Paige set the letter aside. She didn't understand how Mara could consider herself a failure, but the thought had been in the first letter, too.

"How are you doing, sweetie?" she asked Sami, who was a small lump in the formless seat of the swing. Carefully she lifted her out, and in a voice so light that it belied the gist of the words, said, "She wasn't a failure, but she was coming from a different place from her parents.

Like me, I suppose. Only I have Nonny." She folded her legs and propped Sami in the middle, then squiggled a finger toward the little girl's tummy, tickled for a minute, withdrew, and squiggled forward again. "I think you're putting on weight. There's more here than there was this time last week." She tickled. "Come on, Sami. I want a smile. Just a little one to let me know I'm doing things right."

She was in the middle of another squiggle when the phone rang. She answered it with Sami propped on her hip.

"Hello?"

"You asked what the point was," Noah said without preamble, "and I say that the point is pure fun. You have too much going on in your life to be involved, and I'll be outta here at the end of the year, but in the meantime it might be nice to have some fun."

She took a steadying breath. Even his voice upped the temperature a notch. "Fun is watching a movie or playing Boggle or discussing a book. What we did wasn't fun. It was sex."

"Sex is fun."

"It was an escape. It wasn't rational. I'm not sure I was aware of what was happening."

"And you're a totally rational creature," he said on a note of exasperation that didn't bother her one bit. Let him be exasperated.

In the long run, it was better that way.

She thought of Sara, amazed all over again at the relationship between the two. She wondered how often Noah had seen her over the years, wondered how close they were. If there was caring, Sara had never let onneither when the other girls had been denigrating Noah nor when he had reached out to her after the race. And then there was Noah's own declaration that Sara wouldn't confide in him. Clearly their relationship had problems.

Paige wondered if he ever felt like a failure where Sara was concerned.

"Well," he went on, all business now, Head of School to cross-country coach, "for a totally rational creature, you're missing something when it comes to your team. They ran terribly."

When Sami reached hesitantly for the phone cord, Paige nudged it into her hand. "The conditions weren't ideal."

"They were the same for the other squads, and they ran better than we did. You're too lax, Paige. That's the problem. I've watched practices where you and the girls sit talking."

"When something important comes up, we talk.

I believe in doing that, and I don't care if we lose every race we run, if my talk can help these kids through the nightmare of adolescence.

Actually, though," she thought aloud, "we haven't done much talking lately.

Lately we've worked hard."

"So why such a lousy showing?"

Paige sighed. "No great mystery. Our girls don't see themselves as runners, and they sure don't see themselves as winners. But that's what we need, a win. One win. That's all.

It'll turn the tide."

"How do you get the win without changing the self-image first?"

"That's what I have to figure out. Any suggestions?"

Noah had one, but he wasn't sharing it with Paige. He was annoyed with her because not only had he thoroughly enjoyed making love to her, but he couldn't stop thinking about it.

She might have been unaware of what was going on, but he sure hadn't been. He remembered every detail, from the way her hands had stolen over his body, to the way her nipples had hardened under his tongue, to the tiny sounds that had come from her throat at the moment of climax.

Her desire to dismiss the whole thing annoyed the hell out of him. So he didn't say a word about his planit was none of her goddamn businessand at that moment he wasn't sure it would work, anyway.

There were permissions to secure and equipment to buy, steal, or borrow, and even then he was taking a chance. Granted, history was in his favor, but he was still going out on a limb for a project that could fail. Given the Mount Court community's questionable opinion of him, on top of Sara's decidedly negative one, failure was the last thing he needed.

1 aS eleven ANGIE CAME HOME FROM WORK EARLY. SHE had shifted appointments to free up a few extra hours, not quite sure what she would do with them knowing only that she had to do something. She had been working longer and longer hours, hoping that the demands of her job would blot out painful thoughts, but the thoughts remained. If pushed aside, they crowded back at the first chance. She couldn't escape them. Her life had become a nightmare of going through the motions of the ordinary while nothing about it was ordinary at all.

Dougie, who had always before been free with words and affection, was suddenly miserly with both. During drives to and from school, he sat silently in the car, giving the briefest answers to her questions, volunteering little.

It wasn't much better at home where he spent the bulk of his time in his room either studying or on the phone. Clearly he had issues that weighed heavily on his mind, not the least of which, now, was the tension between his parents.

Ben barely looked at her, rarely spoke to her, certainly never touched her. He was living at home without being therealthough even the latter was in doubt now. She had thought he would be working when she got home, but the house was deserted. His studio was dark, pens capped and papers neatened. The television was off. His car was gone.

She sat down at the kitchen table, not waiting so much as trying to decide what to do next. If Ben had been home, they might have talked.

She supposed that had been at the back of her mind when she had left work early. But the house was as silent and empty as her mind.

She felt helpless. The paralysis of not knowing what to do was nearly as bad as the not knowing itself.

The irony of it was that she knew plenty, just not the right things.

She knew how the human body worked, had taken course after course on its intricacies, and had become a skilled mechanic. She could take what was there, clean it, patch it, and get it working again, but she couldn't create. She couldn't produce something where nothing was before.

She couldn't take emptiness and fill it with meaning.

With neither her husband nor her son talking to her, she felt as though something vital had been removed, as though her body were continuing to function on the force of momentum alone. But it couldn't continue for long. The hollow inside was large and growing.