The jury went out. I lay in bed in my cell and smoked cigarettes during the six hours it took them to deliberate. I was prepared for defeat, for during those six hours, it wasn’t Mr. Bates’s summary I kept hearing. It was the prosecution’s. During the few minutes I did manage to fall asleep, I dreamed of Vivian. We were holding hands, and although she had her own hair, she had my face, and the jury knew it.

Mr. Bates was holding his pen in his hand when we reconvened in the courtroom. The room was filled, the way it had been during the opening days of the trial. The jury filed into the box. Every one of them looked tired and empty; for the first time, it occurred to me to feel sorry for them.

I stood up to face them.

“We find the defendant not guilty by cause of temporary insanity.”

I stood numb amid the cheering and booing until the gavel struck and Mr. Bates gently pulled me down into my seat. A sigh whistled through his teeth. “Your miracle came through. You’d better put Wanda Lowell on your Christmas card list.”

We send our Christmas cards now—the few we do send—from Long Beach. They are plain white laminated cards with “Season’s Greetings” printed in red block letters. I find their simplicity soothing, and I have toned down my formerly flamboyant signature to match. Simplicity is the banner we live under; not even the holiday hysteria will set it aflutter. We have retired as far as possible from the past and past habits. Now time is there to be spent, not saved, and I’ve turned the burden of spending it into a luxury. It takes forty minutes to walk directly from our house to the Safeway supermarket where I work as a cashier, but I allow myself an extra twenty minutes to walk out of my way, to stop and admire a garden or to face the ocean and smoke a cigarette. I find nothing mystical about the ocean. Its surf is just another practical reminder that life is a series of simple repetitions: keep the wind down and storms at abeyance and your surf will continue with its regular rhythm. Of course, there’s always the invisible, sometimes treacherous undercurrent. I feel that undercurrent now and then, unexpectedly, whenever I am taken unawares by a tall girl whose face momentarily resembles Regina’s. Then the resemblance recedes, the undercurrent subsides, and the safe and soothing rhythm returns. . . .