Her glance ran to the door and then back to me. “You’re all mixed up in it, don’t you see? After that fight he told me Henry saw you as a son, not him.” The words rushed out now. “It’s all a mess. One night when we were smoking dope with the lights turned out he started telling me, like he could only say it when I couldn’t see him and he was stoned. About how when he was fourteen, looking at Kris Ann made him feel tight in his throat, all strange. He would think about her alone in his room—like maybe he did things to himself.” She blushed. “I shouldn’t say that. It’s just that he wanted to believe they were close somehow—like she had no mother and he didn’t really have a father so they should have each other. But then she did something to spoil it, he said, something about a garden, I don’t know what. I’ve been afraid to ask—you know, when he was straight.” She looked at me. “Kris Ann loves you and so does his daddy. So he’s got to hate all of you, understand? He can’t handle it any other way.”

“That doesn’t scare you?”

She gazed down at the needlepoint cat, catlike herself: darting eyes clear, then opaque. In a low voice, she said, “Sometimes I hate her, too.”

“Krissy’s no one to hate,” I answered gently. “She’s as confused as you or I, only her looks don’t ask for help. That makes it harder.”

She seemed suddenly not to hear me, but to be listening outside. Footsteps echoed in the tile corridor, moving toward us. We listened like mutes as they came closer and stopped outside. Keys jangled. She turned to me, pleading. I rose, and then the neighbor’s door opened and shut.

In silence like a caught breath I asked, “For God’s sake, why do you stay with him?”

She sagged in her chair. “He loves me,” she said finally. “I’m not from fancy people. I’m no one special. But I can help him. He’s not like he seems; the reason his daddy hurt him so is that he’s a gentle boy who went begging for love. That’s all he needs.”

It sounded like a litany of faith. “The Florence Nightingale route is a hard one, Terry.”

“What’s that?”

“The notion that if you just love someone a little more, ignore what they are, you’ll undo things that happened so young that they’re part of them.”

“But you don’t understand.” She said it with youthful stubbornness, clinging to what she hoped she knew. Her face—soft, unlined, yet to be written on—was still that of a woman yet to happen. In a fierce, scared undertone, she pleaded, “Let me alone with him. Please, just leave.”