It hurt, really hurt. I reached for his hand but he kept rubbing and poking. “It hurts,” I said.

He pressed his mouth to my ear. “It hurts at first and then it feels really, really good,” he said.

But it was burning me. “This is so stupid,” I said in a voice my mother hated. I’d been using it a lot lately. It was probably the reason she’d handed me over to Mrs. Pike. I was embarrassed by the sound of the voice. I tried to yank his hand out of my suit but he clamped me tighter against the table. His shoulder was pushing against my jaw. I shifted my mouth slightly and bit down hard.

He flinched back. “Jesus.”

You become a creature I can’t understand, my mother sometimes said to me.

He pulled away and looked at me then smiled and came for me again. But I had enough space now to put out my arms and shove him off of me. The weird thing was, Hugh’s body fell so willingly. He fell backward over the lip of the tub and his head hit the tiled wall with a perfect clack, like the castanets in “It’s a Small World.” It worried me that he didn’t open his eyes. I picked up the diapers and unlocked the door.

I knew I should tell Thomas or Mary or call 911 from the phone in the little room, but I walked outside toward the pool. I rehearsed not what I was going to say to Mrs. Pike or Kay but what I would write to Gina from jail, how I would explain it to her, the way he went down so easily, like a slinky you just have to nudge at the top of a staircase. I needed to remember to bring my notebook with me to jail.

“Well, the diapers must have been somewhere in California,” Mrs. Pike said.

Kay had either dozed off or was pretending to, with Elsie in a deep sleep on her chest.

I was saying things in my head but nothing was coming out.

“Look, Cara, look! Look at me!” Stevie called from the pool. “I’m doing this all by my lone self!” He swam the whole width of the pool slowly, his arms and legs beneath him moving every which way, his head between the inflated wings on his arms, his mouth in a concentrated frown.

“Good job.”

“What’s wrong with your voice?”

“Nothing.”

“I’ll swim all the way to there”—he pointed to the deep end—“if you come with me. You can be my own pet wolf shark.”

“A wolf shark? That sounds scary.”

“They don’t have to be.”

It would be odd now if I said suddenly that I’d bitten Hugh and also he might be unconscious.