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slowly, coming fully awake. A busy signal only. Had the phone rung at all? She lay back down, her heart thumping wildly. Joanne spent the rest of the night trapped somewhere between sleep and wakefulness, wondering whether the ring that had awakened her had been the telephone or her mother’s laughter, finally telling her the truth.

FOUR
    T he girls were still asleep—or pretending to be—when Joanne left the house at just before noon the next morning. She was tired, her eyes swollen from a combination of tears and lack of sleep. She rubbed them, hearing her mother tell her that would only make them worse. What would you say to me now, Mom? she asked the cloudless sky as she crossed from her front lawn over to Eve’s. Shoulders back, stomach in! she heard her mother answer and she smiled. Her mother’s answer to everything.
    You always liked Paul, Joanne continued silently, feeling her mother’s presence beside her as she mounted the steps to Eve’s front door. What wasn’t there to like? her mother responded simply. A smart, good-looking boy from a nice family, he wanted to be a lawyer, he loved my daughter …
    Loved, Joanne repeated in her mind. What do you do, Mom, she questioned, knocking on Eve’s door, when someone suddenly stops loving you?
    No one came to the door. Joanne knocked again, then rang the bell. The sound of the chime reminded her of the phone ringing in the middle of the night. Had it rung orhad she dreamt it? And what kind of sick mind got its kicks from phoning other people in the early morning hours and frightening them half to death? She had tossed and turned for the rest of the night, unable to find a comfortable position without Paul’s body to act as a guide. She was going to need all the sleep she could get if she was going to make it through the next little while without falling apart, if she was to maintain a calm exterior in front of her daughters. Don’t worry, darlings, everything will work out.
    In the meantime, she needed to talk to Eve. Eve would put everything in its proper perspective. She would help Joanne understand Paul’s point of view. “There are always two sides to every story,” she could hear Eve declare. “Yours—and the shithead’s!” Eve would make her laugh, and if not, at least they could cry together. Where was she? Why wasn’t she answering the door?
    Eve’s husband, Brian, appeared just as Joanne was about to give up and go back home. A tall man who had always seemed vaguely uncomfortable with the strong, imposing image he naturally projected, he had surprisingly gentle eyes which betrayed nothing of the daily horrors to which his job regularly exposed him. The perfect policeman’s face, Joanne thought as Brian Stanley, looking exactly his age at forty-five, ushered Joanne inside, smiling but obviously preoccupied. Normally a man of few words, today he said even less. “You talk some sense into her,” he said, indicating that his wife was in the kitchen.
    Joanne walked through the front hall of the house, which was the mirror image of her own. She found Eve sitting at her kitchen table nursing a cup of coffee. Something was out of place, Joanne felt as soon as she sawher friend. (What’s wrong with this picture? she heard echoing in the back of her head.) “What’s up?” Joanne asked, realizing that her friend was still in her bathrobe and that her usually perfect hair was uncombed.
    “Nothing,” Eve told her, making no effort to disguise her annoyance. “It’s a lot of fuss over nothing.”
    “Sure, it’s nothing,” Eve’s mother chastised, appearing seemingly from out of nowhere to stick a thermometer into her daughter’s reluctant mouth.
    “Hello, Mrs. Cameron,” Joanne said, surprised to see the woman, whose strawberry blond hair was several shades lighter than Joanne last remembered. She wondered what Eve’s mother was doing here. “What’s going on?”
    “What’s going on,” the woman repeated, “is that my daughter