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the wide windowsills at the back of the studio. Midway across the room, she stopped, saw what these paintings were, understood they would not be part of the show.
    Alice never talked about these portraits. She never brought them out, but neither did she hide them. She had completed one so far, had two more in progress. They were all of the girl, in different poses, at successive ages. When Casey Redman hit the windshield, all Alice could register were her stunned eyes. The first time she really saw her face was when she was already on the ground, expression no longer present. So, although the girl in the paintings was going through the motions of growing up—floating on a raft on an indigo lake, sitting inside a snow fort, dancing awkwardly at a birthday party—she was always wearing cutoffs and a thin pink and green madras shirt, the only clothes Alice ever saw her wear. And her face was as dead as a saint preserved inside a glass altar.
    Alice didn’t talk about these paintings because everyone seemed to be done talking about the accident. For Alice, a low, yellow-gray cloud had formed, obscuring the movement of responsibility being pushed around, sorted into amorphous parcels. Her parcel: Why had she even gotten into the car in the first place, and once there, seeing how fuckedupNick and Olivia were, why had she stayed in the backseat, not for a moment thinking to offer herself up as a more reasonable driver? Just because she wanted to keep making out with Maude? Now when she dragged out the scales of conscience, her desire, she could see, was a feather; Casey Redman’s life a rock. A rock as big as a mountain. A mountain made of lead.
    Alice never had a day she didn’t think about the girl. Everybody, she figured, had to coat the grain of sand in his or her own way. Making these paintings was hers. How the others managed their own unwieldy burdens she didn’t know. How the girl’s parents bore the loss of her, she couldn’t even get close to thinking about.
    She knew Carmen tortured herself for letting them all leave the farm that night in a car running with just fog lamps. She knew it was too late, and that they were too tired, too stoned, too goofed-up on sex, a perfect confluence of weak elements that only needed the addition of a stray child to coalesce into tragedy. And so Alice was certain that once Carmen understood the nature of the paintings, she would pause for a moment inside her hesitation, then turn and come back and they would all be released back into the present, into the slow forward motion of their lives.
    Carmen checked her watch.
    “We’ve got to get going. I need to get some dinner together. Then I’m meeting Jean at Broadway and Belmont.” She pulled from her carry all a handful of buttons printed with TAKE BACK THE NIGHT . There was a march tonight, which Alice had totally forgotten. Carmen was on the board of this group, which promoted a safer urban environment for women, and taught heightened awareness in risky situations along with self-defense tactics. Another of Carmen’s undeniably worthy missions. Almost everyone Alice knew had a story of being squeezed into a dangerous or just too-weird situation at the hands of the creep in the shadowy parking garage, the cab driver who suddenly veered off the expected route, or (this from her straight friends) theguy who seemed okay in the bar, then, once in his apartment, set about chaining you to his radiator.
    Carmen came to this cause already burdened with a close-up view of the dark side of male/female—and some times female/female—interaction. Her job at the women’s shelter had exposed her to all the soft spots where the fist or belt had landed. The stories dragged in by these women were harrowing. She told them to Alice; sometimes Alice could hardly listen. One woman walked in with a number of her recently dislodged teeth rattling around in her pocket. Another had a face that, when looked at straight on was okay, but from the side,