“Mia, they’re lying to you about your chap.”

“You don’t know that, so don’t be hateful!”

“I do know it.” And she did. But there wasn’t proof, gods damn it! How did you prove a feeling, even one as strong as this?

“Flagg—Walter, if you like that better—he promised you seven years. Sayre says you can have five. What if they hand you a card, GOOD FOR THREE YEARS OF CHILD-REARING WITH STAMP, when you get to this Dixie Pig? Gonna go with that, too?”

“That won’t happen! You’re as nasty as the other one! Shut up!”

“You got a nerve calling me nasty! Can’t wait to give birth to a child supposed to murder his Daddy.”

“I don’t care!”

“You’re all confused, girl, between what you want to happen and what will happen. How do you know they aren’t gonna kill him before he can cry out his first breath, and grind him up and feed him to these Breaker bastards?”

“Shut … up!”

“Kind of a super-food? Finish the job all at once?”

“Shut up, I said, shut UP!”

“Point is, you don’t know. You don’t know anything. You just the babysitter, just the au pair. You know they lie, you know they trick and never treat, and yet you go on. And you want me to shut up.”

“Yes! Yes!”

“I won’t,” Susannah told her grimly, and seized Mia’s shoulders. They were amazingly bony under the dress, but hot, as if the woman were running a fever. “I won’t because it’s really mine and you know it. Cat can have kittens in the oven, girl, but that won’t ever make em muffins.”

All right, they had made it back to all-out fury after all. Mia’s face twisted into something both horrible and unhappy. In Mia’s eyes, Susannah thought she could see the endless, craving, grieving creature this woman once had been. And something else. A spark that might be blown into belief. If there was time.

“I’ll shut you up,” Mia said, and suddenly Fedic’s main street tore open, just as the allure had. Behind it was a kind of bulging darkness. But not empty. Oh no, not empty, Susannah felt that very clearly.

They fell toward it. Mia propelled them toward it. Susannah tried to hold them back with no success at all. As they tumbled into the dark, she heard a singsong thought running through her head, running in an endless worry-circle: Oh Susannah-Mio, divided girl of mine, Done parked her RIG

FIFTEEN

in the DIXIE PIG, In the year of—

Before this annoying (but ever so important) jingle could finish its latest circuit through Susannah-Mio’s head, the head in question struck something, and hard enough to send a galaxy of bright stars exploding across her field of vision. When they cleared, she saw, very large, in front of her eyes:

NK AWA

She pulled back and saw BANGO SKANK AWAITS THE KING! It was the graffito written on the inside of the toilet stall’s door. Her life was haunted by doors—had been, it seemed, ever since the door of her cell had clanged closed behind her in Oxford, Mississippi—but this one was shut. Good. She was coming to believe that shut doors presented fewer problems. Soon enough this one would open and the problems would start again.