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of the starless night mercifully hiding the empty pit the workers had left her. She shifted in the direction of Eve’s house next door, the lights surrounding Eve’s patio bright and accusing. Pulling the curtains tightly closed, she picked up the telephone and dialed, hanging up when Eve failed to answer after eight rings. It was late, she realized, remembering that Eve had told her that she and Brian were attending some police function that night. She wondered what time they would be home, saw by the clock on the bedside table that it was almost midnight already.
    Lulu was asleep, or at least she had pretended to be asleep when Joanne looked in on her earlier. Robin was at a party.
    Moving like an automaton, Joanne crawled back under the covers of the king-size bed she and Paul had purchased shortly after moving to this house some twelve years ago, after almost eight years of sleeping on a mattress on the floor in their older, smaller home in Roslyn. Up the ladder of success, she thought, feeling her life reduced to an unpleasant statistic.
    Her parents had lied to her, she thought, trying not to see their faces behind her closed lids. They had promised knowledge and stability with the coming of age, if not in so many words, then by their very presence as adults. She would grow up, their smiles had silently promised, and the world would be hers. She would have control over her actions, over her fate. She would make decisions; she would vote; she would be secure in a world that was fixed and permanent.
    And for a while they had been right: she had grown up essentially as planned, had married, the way it had been predicted, and had borne children of her own, children who had then looked to her as the established adult and keeper of wisdom. And she had become part of the secret conspiracy, which, while it never overtly lied, never really told the truth. Hearing a key turn in the lock, aware of Robin’s footsteps on the stairs, Joanne fell asleep with the memory of the smell of her mother’s perfume.
    In her dream she saw the sun shining, unimpeded by clouds, causing the concrete squares of the narrow path before her to sparkle like bright diamonds, warm againsther bare feet as she walked toward the small white cottage ahead. She was perhaps five years old. Her brother, two years her junior, was taking his afternoon nap. She could hear laughter coming from inside, knew that her mother and grandmother were already in the kitchen preparing supper for when their men returned from the city, as they did every Friday afternoon during the two months of summer that the extended family shared this cottage in the country. The child Joanne skipped toward the front door, glancing sideways at the driveway, projecting ahead an hour or two when, one after the other, the two cars would pull into the driveway, and first her grandfather, a huge, robust man, and then her father, smaller but with a strong, hearty laugh, would appear, their arms loaded with fresh breads and blueberry buns and cherry danishes, enough to tide them over until the following weekend. Her father would bend forward to kiss her before disappearing inside the cottage, but her grandfather would linger, throwing down the paper bags of baked goods, and scooping her up into his mammoth arms, twirling her around again and again. When you’re older, he would tell her, I’ll teach you how to play gin rummy. And each week, Joanne would wonder if she was older yet. She reached the front door of the cottage, eager to embrace the warm darkness of the interior rooms, hearing her mother’s high, girlish giggle ringing through the heavy wooden door.
    The phone was ringing. Joanne groped for it in a daze, her eyes unwilling to open, her mind clinging to her child’s body, her mother’s laughter luring her back to sleep. “Hello,” she said, not sure for the moment who she was, only that she was no longer a little girl.
    There was no one there. Not even silence, she realized