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was sitting. He knelt down in front of the couch, put his big hands on her shoulders, put his forehead gently on hers, then pulled back and smiled. As usual, Hannah felt like she was looking into a mirror. Jimmy was fourteen months older, but people had been mistaking them for twins for as long as Hannah could remember. Jimmy was hetero—pathologically heterosexual, that’s the way he described himself—but gays were hitting on him all the time. It didn’t surprise Hannah. She’d always thought he was the prettier one.
    “I’m on your side, Sis.”
    She said, “I know that.”
    “If you don’t want me to call the paper, I don’t call the paper. But that means it’s out of our control, somebody else gets to call the play.”
    She didn’t say anything, just closed her eyes.
    Jimmy said, “The bastards raped you. Let them start denying it.”
    That’s when Hannah finally said, “Go ahead and make the call.” She didn’t go to the Vertical. She decided against going to an AA meeting. She had started to go less and less. They had seemed like off-off-off Broadway plays to her at first, like something you’d see at some little place down in the Village, one of those coffee-shop productions she’d had parts in once, when she was going to be the next Meryl. But now AA was beginning to bore her. Lately she couldn’t even get into talking herself, when somebody finally got around to calling on her. And more and more, she was tired of listening to the other drunks and all their pain. Over the past year she had lost a lot of interest in other people’s pain.
    Hannah went into Jimmy’s guest room, closed her eyes, and slept for fourteen hours, slept until she was on the front page of the
Daily News.
    She had stayed inside Jimmy’s apartment all day yesterday. Jimmy had asked her what she wanted to do after they’d both read the paper, and Hannah said, “Hide under the bed.” He told her to be his guest, just don’t answer the phone. He’d gone out for some auditions,come back with Chinese food; they’d watched all the local news channels try to catch up with Marty Perez’s story. Hannah went to bed at eight-thirty and slept like a dead person again.
    Now it was the second day. “Hannah Carey held hostage, day two,” Jimmy’d said before going out for more auditions and a callback on a part in a CBS movie they were going to shoot in New York. He left Hannah in the living room, reading Perez’s follow-up story.
    It was pretty much a rehash of what he had written yesterday, with a statement from the Knicks thrown in, the statement saying they were looking into the matter. There were some quotes from Jimmy that Perez seemed to have saved up, Jimmy still being identified as “the brother of the alleged victim.” Hannah read it all the way through, then read the stories in the other papers, trying to take a step back today, imagining the whole thing was about somebody else. After all the times when it had just been inside her head, or inside Beth’s little office down in the Village, now it was in front of her, on the page. If it’s not on the page, it’s not on the page, that’s what Jimmy Carey always said. So there she was finally, out there for everybody to see.
    See and not see, Hannah thought.
    There was no name to go with the story.
    There was no face.
    This part even Hannah knew from all the other cases. This was the big joke, that this all was a way of protecting the victim’s privacy. Oh sure, Hannah thought. The truth was, they didn’t protect your privacy at all; Hannah had figured that one out already. Privacy didn’t enter into it. They just kept your name out of the paper and off television most of the time, unless they really wanted to screw around with you. They put your age in there, and your height, how much you weighed—which was high, by the way; she hadn’t been as high as one-forty in years. They put in there what street you lived on and your occupation. What color your hair