I listened: somewhere in the restaurant, a girl was crying softly to herself.

"I don't hear anything," I said. "So you really think I should call the cops?"

"L.J., someone is upset. Can you see who it is? They're right behind us."

I craned my neck to see. A few booths back from ours, a girl was crying. She looked about nineteen and was tall with muscular shoulders and arms. Her face was mannish, made even more so by her hair, which she wore in two fist-like buns. She was rummaging through a tote bag with the name of a radio station on it. I recognized her from around the motel. She had come with a singing troupe that had stayed at the Sh.o.r.es for an a capella convention the previous weekend. Gay and I had heard them practicing through the doors to their rooms, their voices weaving in and out of each other. Looking at the girl now, I recalled seeing her argue with the troupe leader in the parking lot one evening when I was out on my balcony. She'd been crying then, too.

"It's nothing," I said to Gay. "She's fine. Listen, I think that calling the police on Nancy is the wrong move."

"Let me see what's going on. Turn me around, L.J.," Gay said, but I made no move to do so.

A waiter approached the girl, but this only made her more upset.

"Hey, behind me!" Gay yelled, sitting there in our booth, limp as a puppet. "Excuse me!"

"Gay, the waiter's got it under control," I said. "Gay! I'm talking to you!"

The waiter continued to speak to the girl, until she said, "Fine! Of course!" She threw some money on the table and then got up and headed toward the door. She was even taller than I'd thought, over six feet.

When she approached our booth, Gay said, "That's a lovely bag, miss."

She glanced at him but kept walking.

"I'd love to hear you sing sometime," Gay called after her.

Once she was gone, Gay shifted his gaze to me. "Why didn't you help me, L.J.?"

"I didn't hear you. I was thinking about Nancy."

"You should have turned me around," said Gay. "She's obviously in need of some kind of help."

"I'm sorry," I said, ashamed and eager for the incident to be over.

Gay sighed. "That's all right, L.J.," he said. But there was a sadness in his voice, a tiredness. He asked me to help him into his chair, which I did.

"Now, where were we?" he said as I unlocked the brake.

I tried to remember what I'd just told him about Nancy. My mind scrambled to come up with something, but I couldn't bring myself to say one more word about her.

I glanced at Gay. He was watching me, his gaze sympathetic but also strangely appraising, almost judicious. I had the sinking feeling that this would be my last chance to tell him the truth about my family. I reached into my shirt, but just as my fingers closed around the earrings, the sun came out from behind a cloud and light poured in through the window, bringing Gay's face into harsh relief-the pits, the knots and whorls of scar tissue-and my fears returned. The earrings felt warm in my fingers. I had them pinched all the way up at my shirt collar, dangling right there at the base of my neck. "I have an idea," I said. "Let's go up to the overpa.s.s and have a drink."

Gay sucked air through his teeth. "I wish I could, L.J., but I should get some rest soon. I have time to talk a bit, though. Were you about to say something?"

"You're heading to bed? It's only six o'clock."

"What I meant was that I have to practice my speaking a little, in my room. I should lecture the mirror for a bit. Unless there's something else you want to tell me about?"

I was still holding the earrings. "No. I was all done."

As we left the restaurant I took the earrings from around my neck and slipped them into the pouch on the side of his wheelchair. I don't know what I hoped to accomplish. Maybe I thought he would find them and it would force the issue. Maybe I wanted to give him something, a gift to keep him my friend. "Gay, listen," I said, but he was already pulling away from me and heading toward the elevators.

After he'd gone up to his room, I sat alone in the lobby for a long while. I watched people check in, check out. I know I might have made it seem that only strange people lived in this area of Florida, but it wasn't so. There were plenty of plain men and women, children too, living and visiting. But detectives are very plain people, the plainest of all. You might imagine them hunching around in rumpled trench coats, their faces always surfacing through cigarette smoke, but they are dull almost to being invisible. They look like your mother with no makeup, or your uncle.

Gay started spending less and less time in and near Orlando; he left to speak at places farther away, in Velusia or Delans, and he wouldn't come back for days at a time. More and more often, I'd return from the Home Wrecker and find his room locked, find it dark. My fear was that I'd return one afternoon and see it being vacuumed out, or even worse, rented to someone new. One evening, as I drove toward the Sh.o.r.es, I spied Gay up on the overpa.s.s with that girl, the one from the a capella troupe. He was beaming at her from his chair, smiling as widely as I'd ever seen him smile. I pulled to the side of the road and watched. Even from far away I could hear her singing. Her voice sounded beautiful and deep; so deep in fact that it seemed more like a low vibration than an actual voice, the kind of voice that moves beneath the other voices in a choir like a current on which everything else floats.

I began to have trouble concentrating on work. There was no joy in it. I changed my name to Mel Captiol, then changed it again, this time to something very close to my given name. One afternoon, just before closing, a ma.s.sive girl came into the Home Wrecker. She wore a sleeveless dress and her arms had to be two, even three times the size of my legs. She had it in her. I could tell. She lumbered up to me and pulled her ticket from her purse, all the while staring at the house, which rocked gently against its cables in the wind. I took her ticket and she thanked me and then went directly inside, no hesitating at the door, just right on in. I hurried over to watch.

The girl marched around for a minute, sizing everything up, poking at this and that with her shoe-the coffee table in the living room, the refrigerator. I looked on from the doorway, excited. She carried her purse in a tight fist. She sank up to her shins in the balloon floor each time she took a step. The whole house shook with her, as though terrified. She was the one. I knew it. She was going to bring the place down. I could almost feel the heat coming off the back of her neck. The flowers on her dress were red on red.

Suddenly she flopped down on an inflated sofa, took a book out of her purse, and started to read. I was stunned with disappointment. There was nothing to do but stand there and watch as her eyes scanned the pages, her book propped on her chest, her crossed feet wagging from side to side.

When I got home, I went straight to Gay's room, but he wasn't there. I sat outside his door and waited for a long time before finally heading to my room. As soon as I entered, a detective gently shut the door behind me, just slid it closed with his loafer. There were five of them sitting calmly about, waiting. A woman with a cast on her foot had already gone through my clothes and stacked them neatly on the bed. Her blouse was the exact color of the walls. Another one had dragged the safe out of the closet and onto the balcony, where he was banging on its bottom with a wedge and hammer.

Normally at this point I would have fled, maybe fought, but I felt so defeated, so run-down. One of them was sitting on the air conditioner, his T-shirt tucked into his bathing suit. "You can run if you want," this one said. "We'll just find you again."

"Your family's worried about you," said the woman, yawning.

"They want the best for you," said another.

"No, they don't," I started to say, but my tongue felt big. The bitter taste filled my mouth. "I'll give you money if you leave," I said, though I'd tried this with them before. All of this had happened before.

"We don't want money. We want you," a familiar voice said from the balcony. Then it called me by my real name. Melanie came in through the curtains. Her hair was pulled back in a ponytail, the same way she'd worn it when we were kids. She had on jeans and sneakers and a sweater with a row of crowns across the front. For a moment I thought she'd come to save me.

"It's been so long. I missed you," she said, and gave me a hug. Her hair smelled both lemony and strangely medicinal. When she pulled away, she kept her hands on my arms. "How have you been?"

"I want to stay here," I said.

"Please don't," she said, smiling at me, her hands still gripping my arms.

"I don't want to go back," I said.

"Well, I'm afraid you don't have a choice in the matter, okay?" she said. "You know you can't just gallivant around forever. Don't you ever think about how it reflects on Mom and Dad and the rest of us? Believe me, you're lucky we found you before you did anything to attract bad attention. I know. You don't want to see what happens to someone from a family like ours when they screw up."

"Melanie, I won't embarra.s.s anyone. I just want to-"

"No. All right?" she said, her voice growing strained. "I'm sorry. I am. But I'm too tired to start arguing. I want to get back home." There was something a little anxious about the way she said all this, almost frantic. "Now, where are the earrings?"

"I gave them away," I said.

"Don't give your sister a hard time," said the man in the bathing suit. "You should be grateful to her for coming all this way."

"Plenty of people in this world have no family," said the woman.

"They're out on the street," said another. A hot breeze rolled over the balcony. I felt myself growing small, weak. I looked desperately at Melanie, but she stared right back at me with her own great need.

"Are you going to open the safe or not?" said the man behind me.

"No," I said, though I felt tired enough to do it.

He slipped me into a nelson.

"Don't hurt him," said Melanie, reaching for me, then pulling back.

"I'll have this cracked in a minute," said the man on the balcony with the safe. "It's a cheapie." He put down his hammer and hefted the safe onto the balcony railing. He had it lying on its side so the bottom faced us. "Knock it on the screw there," he said to the one in the bathing suit, who picked up the hammer and began pounding away at the bottom of the safe. The noise traveled through me in waves. I thought I might pa.s.s out.

"Melanie, please help me," I said.

The man holding me tightened his grip and a web of pain spread through my shoulders. "Enough from you, kiddo," he said.

And then, out of nowhere, Gay's voice: "What's going on up there? Are you all right, L.J.?"

"Gay!" I shouted, writhing. "They're taking me back!" I managed to maneuver the man holding me out onto the balcony. Gay was with Edward, stopped just below my room.

"Who is that down there?" Melanie said, coming out onto the balcony.

"Well, well. I thought we'd never get the pleasure," said Gay. "I have a bone to pick with you, Nancy."

"Is he talking to me?" Melanie's eyes darted back and forth between Gay and me. "Please go away!" she called down.

"Not until you leave L.J. alone. He's through with you. You and your family are out of his life forever."

"Please, this is our business!" she said.

"No, Nancy, it's my business when your goons treat my friend like he's your property! It's my business when you stop my friend from making his own decisions!"

"Who is he?" Melanie said to me. "How does he know about our family?" She had the wild look on her face of one of those children at the Home Wrecker.

"Shut up, gimp!" said the man holding me.

"You watch your mouth!" said Edward.

"How do you know what's best for him?" said Melanie. "He doesn't even know what's best for himself right now!"

"He knows what's not best for him," said Gay. "And that's enough for me."

"We're his family," said Melanie, her hands gripping the rail. "We love him. We're bringing him home because we love him."

"If you really loved him you'd let him go."

That's when the safe went over. I don't know whether the man pushed it or it simply slipped from his hands. All I saw was it going over the railing: tipping forward, sliding a little, and then falling. It didn't tumble. It didn't spin or flip in the air. It just dropped.

The rest seemed to happen in slow motion. First there was a terrible crunching noise as the safe hit. The wheels shot off Gay's chair and bounced across the parking lot. One hit a car with such force that it shattered the driver's-side window. The chair tipped over backward and Gay was slammed against the tar, the safe on his chest. There was a popping sound, and then came the sparks, pouring right out of the underside of the chair. Gay's perfect feet stuck up in the air-one of them had a sandal on it, but the other was bare. Then Edward was shouting for an ambulance.

Some old people came hurrying out of the lobby. There was a pounding on my door. Everyone but me was rushing about the room, blurred and moth-like. I heard one of the detectives ask another for a knife and a towel. I saw my clothes being stuffed into a garbage bag. Then, when the man holding me let go, I rushed out the door.

"Get him!" I heard behind me. "Grab his arms!"

I muscled my way down the hall, now crowded with curious people. I pushed inside the stairwell and took the steps a flight at a time, but as I reached the lobby, I started to gag, to wretch on that taste welling up at the back of my throat. I could hear the detectives on the stairs. I stumbled through the lobby and then I was out in the parking lot, kneeling next to Edward, above Gay's shattered body.

Gay's face looked peaceful; he appeared strangely content, pinned to the tar, gazing up at the darkening sky. His breath came in little hisses of air. I could smell oil leaking out of the chair. One of his eyelids kept winking.

"Go, before it's too late," said Edward. "He'd want you to."

I looked around at all the people encircling us, staring. I couldn't tell which ones were the detectives; their faces all looked menacingly familiar. A woman in a sun hat with a fan on the brim. An old bearded man with a pack around his waist. A man in shades talking into a plastic walkie-talkie. The taste was still there, pooling in my mouth. I was too frightened to move.

"Go!" said Edward. But I couldn't.

Then, above all of this, I saw Melanie. She was standing on the balcony of my old room. She smiled sadly at me. "Run," she said, and I did.

I called the hospital round the clock, every day for the next four weeks. It got so I knew all the nurses on Gay's floor by name. Every time I called they asked me if I wanted to leave a message for Gay, and each time I said no. I didn't know how to talk to him. One day, though, I called and, instead of picking up, a nurse put me through to Gay's room.

"h.e.l.lo? Gay Isbelle," he said. "h.e.l.lo?"

"Gay?" I said.

"L.J. Wow. I was hoping you'd call."

"Gay, I'm so sorry about what happened. I should have-"

"Before you start apologizing, let me say something. First, there's nothing to be sorry about. I have some healing to do, some b.u.mps and scratches, but I'm okay. In fact, I'm glad things happened the way they did. I wouldn't change a thing."

"You wouldn't?" He had suffered four broken ribs, a punctured lung, and some nerve damage to the right side of his face.

"Not a thing. This was my third ordeal, L.J., this bout with Nancy. I've dodged the bill three times. That's something."

"Gay, I have a confession to make. That wasn't Nancy at the Sh.o.r.es. There is no Nancy."

"I know that," said Gay.

I paused. "You do?"

"Sure."

I didn't know what to say. In the background I heard the chatter from Edward's portable TV. "Gay, I want to come with you when you go speak," I said. "I want to be your a.s.sistant."

"My a.s.sistant? G.o.d, I don't know," he said.

"Please, Gay. I want to go with you to talk to people."

"Geez. I guess that'd be all right. My a.s.sistant, L.J. Yes, I like that."

I laughed. My body felt light with joy. "L.J., your a.s.sistant!" I said.

"Come by tomorrow and we'll talk about what you'll need to do," he said.

I arrived at the hospital well before visiting hours the next day. I brought a bouquet of flowers and a bright green pillowcase for Gay. For myself I brought a legal pad to take notes on. But when I was finally allowed up, I found Gay's room empty, his bed stripped.

"Are you L.J.?" said a nurse whose voice I recognized as Gina's. I told her that yes, I was. "He left this for you," she said. She handed me an envelope, then left me alone in the room.