She turned back. Sad, morphine-loaded eyes looked at me, one peering out of a gauze peephole. An ugly yellowish-red stain was oozing through the bandages. Blood and some sort of ointment, I supposed.

“It matters,” she said. “This isn’t like what happened to Bobbi Jill.” She tried to smile. “You know how a baseball looks, all those red stitches? That’s what Sadie looks like now. They go up and down and all around.”

“They’ll fade.”

“You don’t get it. He cut all the way through my cheek to the inside of my mouth.”

“But you’re alive. And I love you.”

“Say that when the bandages come off,” she said in her dull, doped-up voice. “I make the Bride of Frankenstein look like Liz Taylor.”

I took her hand. “I read something once—”

“I don’t think I’m quite ready for a literary discussion, Jake.” She tried to turn away again, but I held onto her hand. “It was a Japanese proverb. ‘If there is love, smallpox scars are as pretty as dimples.’ I’ll love your face no matter what it looks like.

Because it’s yours.”

She began to cry, and I held her until she quieted. In fact, I thought she had gone to sleep when she said, “I know it’s my fault, I married him, but—”

“It’s not your fault, Sadie, you didn’t know.”

“I knew there was something not right about him. And still I went ahead. I think mostly because my mother and father wanted it so badly. They haven’t come yet, and I’m glad. Because I blame them, too. That’s awful, isn’t it?”

“While you’re serving up the blame, save a helping for me. I saw that goddam Plymouth he was driving at least twice dead on, and maybe a couple of other times out of the corner of my eye.”

“You don’t need to feel guilty on that score. The state police detective and the Texas Ranger who interviewed me said Johnny’s trunk was full of license plates. He probably stole them at motor courts, they said. And he had a lot of stickers, whatdoyoucallums—”

“Decals.” I was thinking of the one that had fooled me at the Candlewood that night. GO, SOONERS. I’d made the mistake of dismissing my repeated sightings of the white-over-red Plymouth as just another harmonic of the past. I should have known better. I would have known better, if half my mind hadn’t been back in Dallas, with Lee Oswald and General Walker. And if blame mattered, there was a helping for Deke, too. After all, he had seen the man, had registered those deep dimples on the sides of his forehead.

Let it go, I thought. It’s happened. It can’t be undone.

Actually, it could.

“Jake, do the police know you aren’t . . . quite who you say you are?” I brushed back the hair on the right side of her face, where it was still long. “I’m fine on that score.”

Deke and I had been interviewed by the same policemen who interviewed Sadie before the docs rolled her into the operating room. The state police detective had issued a tepid reprimand about men who had seen too many TV westerns. The Ranger seconded this, then shook our hands and said, “In your place, I would have done exactly the same thing.”

“Deke’s pretty much kept me out of it. He wants to make sure the schoolboard doesn’t get pissy about you coming back next year. It seems incredible to me that being cut up by a lunatic could lead to dismissal on grounds of moral turpitude, but Deke seems to think it’s best if—”

“I can’t go back. I can’t face the kids looking like I do now.”

“Sadie, if you knew how many of them have come here—”

“That’s sweet, it means a lot, and they’re the very ones I couldn’t face. Don’t you understand? I think I could deal with the ones who’d laugh and make jokes. In Georgia I taught with a woman who had a harelip, and I learned a lot from the way she handled teenage cruelty. It’s the other ones that would undo me. The well-meaning ones. The looks of sympathy . . . and the ones who can’t stand to look at all.” She took a deep, shuddering breath, then burst out: “Also, I’m angry.

I know life is hard, I think everyone knows that in their hearts, but why does it have to be cruel, as well? Why does it have to bite?”

I took her in my arms. The unmarked side of her face was hot and throbbing. “I don’t know, honey.”

“Why are there no second chances?”

I held her. When her breathing became regular, I let her go and stood up quietly to leave.

Without opening her eyes, she said, “You told me there was something you had to witness on Wednesday night. I don’t think it was Johnny Clayton cutting his own throat, was it?”

“No.”

“Did you miss it?”

I thought of lying, didn’t. “Yes.”

Now her eyes opened, but it was a struggle and they wouldn’t stay open for long. “Will you get a second chance?”

“I don’t know. It doesn’t matter.”

That wasn’t the truth. Because it would matter to John Kennedy’s wife and children; it would matter to his brothers; perhaps to Martin Luther King; almost certainly to the tens of thousands of young Americans who were now in high school and who would, if nothing changed the course of history, be invited to put on uniforms, fly to the other side of the world, spread their nether cheeks, and sit down on the big green dildo that was Vietnam.

She closed her eyes. I left the room.

3

There were no current DCHS students in the lobby when I got off the elevator, but there were a couple of alums. Mike Coslaw and Bobbi Jill Allnut were sitting in hard plastic chairs with unread magazines in their laps. Mike jumped up and shook my hand. From Bobbi Jill I got a good strong hug.

“How bad is it?” she asked. “I mean”—she rubbed the tips of her fingers over her own fading scar—“can it be fixed?”

“I don’t know.”

“Have you talked to Dr. Ellerton?” Mike asked. Ellerton, reputedly the best plastic surgeon in central Texas, was the doc who had worked his magic on Bobbi Jill.

“He’s in the hospital this afternoon, doing rounds. Deke, Miz Ellie, and I have an appointment with him in”—I checked my watch—“twenty minutes. Would you two care to sit in?”

“Please,” Bobbi Jill said. “I just know he can fix her. He’s a genius.”

“Come on, then. Let’s see what the genius can do.”

Mike must have read my face, because he squeezed my arm and said, “Maybe it’s not as bad as you think, Mr. A.”

4

It was worse.

Ellerton passed around the photographs—stark black-and-white glossies that reminded me of Weegee and Diane Arbus. Bobbi Jill gasped and turned away. Deke grunted softly, as if he’d been struck a blow. Miz Ellie shuffled through them stoically, but her face lost all color except for the two balls of rouge flaming on her cheeks.