Annie ran to the car. She sat for a long time in the quiet, expensive twilight of the tree-lined street. Then, afraid but eager, she set out for Venice Park. She was tracking herself down, going to all the places she’d been. Perhaps at the end of the trail, she would find something substantial, a token to carry through the days ahead.

The long drive was not oppressive; she was used to being alone, she’d forgotten that. But her thoughts were uneasy, not quite distinct enough for her to say, “Here. This is what I’m thinking about.” She concentrated on Bea. She remembered how Bea had roamed at night, a cup of cold coffee in one hand, her black hair disarrayed. Sometimes there were violent fights in the middle of the night, but Bea had a strange bumbling quality and was no match for Annie’s father when his expression chilled with distaste, when he called Bea “the primitive” to her enraged face.

During the brief time Annie had lived with them, they’d moved so often that she had made few friends, a French boy jeered at by his schoolmates for his thick accent and small stature, an ugly little girl whose glasses revealed the borrowed eyes of an old woman, a girl named Brooks who fell on the classroom floor and turned blue in the face when she dropped a spot of paste or ink on a piece of paper but who, except for these strange seizures, was more reasonable than any other child Annie had ever known. These “friends” were all transients like herself. Through some convention of childhood they never spoke of their troubles to each other. They played their own games, travesties of the games the acceptable children played, the ones to whose houses Annie was never invited, the ones upon whose heads teachers rested hands that gave blessings. These games almost always ended in wild laughter, outsiders’ games, parodies, full of savage disappointment.

She’d forgotten to ask Walter about the scar on his thigh. It bothered her that she’d not asked him. He might never come back. She could see it plainly now in her mind’s eye, the scar tissue glowing in his brown skin. And then, just ahead, she saw the lurid lights of Venice Park. But this time, the sky was not so black, and moonlight laid a white tongue along the surface of the water.