She knew her father loved her. When he returned from his business trips he would bring her back gifts—a piece of fossilized wood, a battery-operated cable car, a blue casino chip—and take her to a movie or the beach, but this affection always seemed to dissipate, and within a few days he was back in his office, answering two phones at the same time and gently shooing her over to the main house. She would refuse, sprawl face down across his desk, until he laughed and agreed to a quick game of hangman. Still, it had always been a desperate kind of love, too precarious. For years, she felt as if she were carefully binding the two of them together with fragile netting, and some morning she might wake up and find it snipped through.

“I missed you too,” she said.

“The house is a mess. I’m a mess. Everyone’s a mess.” He took a handkerchief out of his pocket and blew his nose loudly. “I’m just glad you’re home.”

The word sounded strange. She hadn’t thought of their house as home for a very long time, but she nodded, took a deep breath, and followed her father into the parking lot.

On the way to the house, the palm trees whizzed by, and the lights twinkled in a mass of cityscape. She felt bulleted along the freeway, the film sped up to make the audience aware of itself, and she was very aware of herself. Every inch of her body felt in the wrong place, and it made her twitch and jolt and feel like she had the weekend she was sixteen and had decided to see what it would be like to be a coke addict. Then too, she’d felt tumbled onto a movie set. She had given a boy in her class a fifty-dollar bill, and he presented her with the goods. She didn’t know whether she was being ripped off or how to go about getting the stuff up her nose or what to do once she did, and she kept the Baggie in her pocket until Sunday morning when she spied the gardener’s son. She was lying by the pool on a chaise longue, bundled in a too-warm coat, fingering the Baggie and trying to work up the courage to do something with it, when he appeared with a trash bag full of grass cuttings. “Do you do this?” she had said, and pulled the Baggie from her pocket. He smiled. His front tooth was chipped, and when she wondered what it would be like to run her tongue along it, she tumbled into someone else’s film. She was directed to the guesthouse and instructed to sit on the kitchen floor, and she was glad it was a silent movie because it was easier to watch yourself without the distraction of spoken lines. They cut and snorted, cut and snorted until she felt shot through with candied energy and zoomed her way first to his mouth and then down his chest. It was a montage of body parts, and she watched and thought that perhaps the film would stay focused on the two of them rolling around on the brown linoleum, a teen love flick, but it hadn’t, and instead the old standby had flickered on, and she watched herself beaten with the always reliable belt.