“Oh God,” said Georgia in a voice of terror, touching the heart’s wall. A ventricle hung over her head. “They should fill it with blood for the full effect.”

“With cholesterol,” said Thea. “Or heartbreak.”

“With cocaine,” said Georgia, then, “Do you think it beats all night long?”

“Yes,” said Thea, but of course it was some man’s job to turn it off at night, and on again in the morning. She pictured a mad scientist’s horseshoe-shaped switch with a rubber handle on a wall.

Ka-thump, ka-thump. We gotta get out of here, she thought. Not the heart but the city. She’d already found the job in Austin when Georgia announced that, with money from her father, she would leave the country to clear her head. To do what you want out of my sight, thought Thea, who had assumed that Georgia would follow her to Texas, and Thea would never again have to drive around the neighborhoods of Georgia’s disappearance, remembering she might be in there and she might be dead. That whole terrible night with Florence. But they’d both been wrong about Georgia.

Thea got rid of her house and everything in it. Burn the city to the ground, find the inflammable heart like a poet’s in the ashes, wrap it in a handkerchief, bury it in a mausoleum beneath a mile of marble.

Love, love, love, love, love, love, love, love, love, love, love, love, love, love, love, love, love, love, love, love, love.

The word meant nothing. They should replace it with another.

In the junk-shop back room, the woman scaled an outcropping of stacked record albums, covers scuffed to show the shape of the discs inside. Nearby was a box of thick seventy-eights, grackle black and grackle brilliant. Thea thought the cliff might come down. But the woman was goat-footed; she got to the top and came back down and handed over the doll.

Georgia, aged eight, had not just wanted Baby Alive: she had thought it would make the difference. What difference? The only one. Maybe it would have. It was hard to tell, ever, what would make it: the walk-through heart, the indulgent mother, the mean one. They’d driven into a ditch, then away. They’d kept on going. They’d used up every bit of luck they had, making their getaway. Thea never spoke to Florence again, though Orly was still dead, would be dead forever.