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hundred more plants: some of them were named after movie stars or singers, like Paul, Robert, Faye, Susan, Julia, Jack. Most were small, from a desert somewhere.
    On a broken-down Salvation Army table, the first piece of furniture she’d bought in California, she kept a piece of Wisconsin: a clump of birdsfoot violets, dug from the banks of the Whitewater River, and a flat of lilies-of-the-valley. Just now, the lilies-of-the-valley were blooming, their tiny white bell flowers producing a delicate perfume that reminded her of the smell of dooryard lilacs in the Midwestern spring.
    Behind the California tan, Anna was a Midwestern farm kid, born and raised on a corn farm in Wisconsin.
    The farm was part of her toughness: She had a farm kid’s lack of fear when it came to physical confrontation. She’d even been in a couple of fights, in her twenties, in the good old days of music school and late-night prowls down Sunset. As she climbed into her thirties, the adrenaline charge diminished, though her reputation hadn’t: The big guys still waved to her from the muscle pen on the beach, and told people, ‘‘You don’t fuck with Anna, if you wanna keep your face on straight.’’
    The toughness extended to the psychological. Farm kids knew how the world worked, right from the start. She’d taken the fuzzy-coated big-eyed lambs to the locker, and brought them back in little white packages.
    That’s the way it was. Anna finished watering the plants, yawned again, and stopped at the piano. Liszt was hard. Deliberately hard. Her home phone rang, and she turned away from the piano and stepped into the small kitchen and picked it up. This would be the sign-off from Louis and Creek: ‘‘Hello?’’
    ‘‘Anna: Louis.’’
    ‘‘All done?’’
    ‘‘Yeah, but I was talking to a guy at Seventeen about the animal rescue tape. I don’t know what they did, but it sounds a little weird.’’
    ‘‘Like how, weird?’’ Anna asked.
    ‘‘Like they’re making some kind of cartoon out of it.’’
    ‘‘What?’’ She was annoyed, but only mildly. Strange things happened in the world of broadcast television.
    ‘‘He said they’ll be running it on the Worm,’’ Louis said. Channel Seventeen called it the Early Bird News; everybody else called it the Worm.
    Anna glanced at the kitchen clock: the broadcast was just a few minutes away. ‘‘I’ll take a look at it,’’ she said. She went back to the piano and worked on the Liszt until five o’clock in the morning, then pointed the remote at the TV and punched in Seventeen. A carefully-coiffed blonde, dressed like it was midafternoon on Rodeo, looked out and said, ‘‘If you have any small children watching this show, the film we are about to show you . . .’’
    And there was the jumper, up on the wall like a fly.
    Anna held her breath, fearing for him, though she’d been there, and knew what was about to happen. But seeing it this way, with the TV, was like looking out a window and seeing it all over again. The man seemed unsure of where he was, of what to do; he might have been trying, at the last moment, to get inside.
    Then he lost it: Anna felt her own fingers tightening, looking for purchase, felt her own muscles involuntarily trying to balance. He hung there, but with nothing to hold on to, out over the air, until with a convulsive effort, he jumped.
    And he screamed—Anna hadn’t seen the scream, hadn’t picked it up. Maybe he had been trying for the pool.
    Anna and the night crew had been there for the pictures, not as reporters: Anna had gotten only enough basic information to identify the main characters. She left it to the TV news staffs to pull it together. At Channel Seventeen, the job went to an intense young woman in a spiffy green suit that precisely matched her spiffy green eyes:
    ‘‘. . . identified as Jacob Harper, Junior, a high-school senior from San Dimas who was attending a spring dance at the Shamrock, and who’d rented the room with