"Eight years ago this week, Summer Dawn Macklesby was snatched from her infant seat on her parents' enclosed front porch in suburban Conway," the sentence began. "Teresa Macklesby, preparing for a shopping expedition, left her infant daughter on the porch while she stepped back into the house to retrieve a package she intended to mail before Christmas. While she was in the house, the telephone rang, and though Macklesby is sure she was absent from the porch no longer than five minutes, by the time she returned Summer Dawn had vanished."

I closed my eyes. I folded the paper so I couldn't read the rest of the story and carried it to the recycle bin and dumped it in as if it were contaminated with the grief and agony implied in that one partial story.

That night I had to walk.

Some nights sleep played a cheap trick on me and hid. Those nights, no matter how tired I was, no matter what energy I needed for the day to come, I had to walk. Though these episodes were less frequent than even a year ago, they still occurred perhaps once every two weeks.

Sometimes I made sure nobody saw me. Sometimes I strode down the middle of the street. My thoughts were seldom pleasant on walking nights, and yet my mind could not be at peace any more than my body.

I haven't ever understood it.

After all, as I often tell myself, the Bad Thing has already happened. I do not need to fear anymore.

Doesn't everyone wait for the Bad Thing? Every woman I've ever known does. Maybe men have a Bad Thing, too, and they don't admit it. A woman's Bad Thing, of course, is being abducted, raped, and knifed; left bleeding, an object of revulsion and pity to those who find her, be she dead or alive.

Well, that had happened to me.

Since I had never been a mother, I had never had to imagine any other disasters. But tonight I thought maybe there was a Worse Thing. The Worse Thing would be having your child taken. The Worse Thing would be years of imagining that child's bones lying in the mud in some ditch, or your child alive and being molested methodically by some monster.

Not knowing.

Thanks to that glimpse of newspaper, I was imagining that now.

I hoped Summer Dawn Macklesby was dead. I hoped she had died within an hour of her abduction. I hoped for that hour she had been unconscious. As I walked and walked in the cold night, that seemed to me to be the best-case scenario.

Of course, it was possible that some loving couple who desperately wanted a little girl had just picked up Summer Dawn and had bought her everything her heart desired and enrolled her in an excellent school and were doing a great job of raising her.

But I didn't believe that stories like Summer Dawn Macklesby's could have a happy ending, just like I didn't believe that all people are basically good. I didn't believe that God gave you compensation for your griefs. I didn't believe that when one door closes, another opens.

I believed that was crap.

I was going to miss some karate classes while I was in Bartley. And the gym would be closed for Christmas Eve, Christmas, and the day after. Maybe I could do calisthenics in my room to compensate? And my sore shoulder could use a rest. So as I packed my bag to leave, I tried not to grumble any more than I already had. I had to make this visit, had to do it with grace.

As I drove to Bartley, which was about a three-hour journey east and a little north from Shakespeare, I tried to drum up some sort of pleasurable anticipation about the coming visit.

It would have been more straightforward if I hated my parents. I loved them.

It was in no way their fault that my abduction, rape, and mutilation had made such a media roar that my life, and theirs, had changed even more than was inevitable.

And it was in no way their fault that no one I'd grown up with seemed to be able to treat me as a normal person, after that second, public, rape in the spotlight of the press and the TV cameras.

Nor was it my parents' fault that my boyfriend of two years had quit seeing me after the press turned their attention away from him.

None of it was their fault—or mine—but it had permanently altered the relationships between us. My mother and father couldn't look at me without thinking of what had happened to me. They couldn't talk to me without it coloring the most commonplace conversation. My only sibling, Varena, who had always been more relaxed and elastic than I had, had never been able to understand why I didn't recover more swiftly and get on with my life as it had been before; and my parents didn't know how to get in contact with the woman I'd become.

Weary of scrambling through this emotional equivalent of a hamster exercise wheel, I was nearly glad to see the outskirts of Bartley—the poor rickety homes and marginal businesses that blotch the approach to most small towns.

Then I was rolling past the filling station where my parents gassed their cars; past the dry cleaner where Mother took their coats; past the Presbyterian church they'd attended all their lives, where they'd been baptized, married, christened their daughters, from which they would be buried.

I turned down the familiar street. On the next block, the house I grew up in was wearing its winter coat. The rosebushes had been trimmed back. The smooth grass of the big yard was pale after the frost. The house sat in the middle of the large lot, surrounded by my father's rose beds. A huge Christmas wreath made from twined grapevines and little gold toy trumpets hung on the front door, and the decorated tree was visible in the big picture window in the living room. Mom and Dad had repainted the house when Varena and Dill got engaged, so it was gleaming white for the wedding festivities.

I parked to the side of the driveway on a concrete apron my parents had poured when Varena and I began driving. We'd had friends over all the time, and my folks got tired of their own vehicles getting blocked in.

I eased out of my car and looked at the house for a long moment, stretching my legs after the drive. It had seemed so big when I'd lived in it. I had always felt so lucky to grow up in this house.

Now I saw a fairly typical built-in-the-fifties house, with a double garage, a living room, a den, a big kitchen, a dining room, and three bedrooms, two baths.

There was a workroom at the back of the garage for my father—not that he ever did anything in it, but men needed a workroom. Just like there was a sewing machine in the corner of my parents' bedroom, because a woman ought to have a sewing machine—not that my mother ever sewed more than a ripped seam. And we Bards had a full complement of family silver—not that we ever ate with it. Someday, in the course of time, Varena and I would divide that silver between us, and the care of it would be on our shoulders; that heavy, ornate silver that was too fine and too much trouble to use.

I got my suitcase and my hanging bag out of the backseat and went up to the front door. My feet felt heavier with every step.

I was home.

Varena answered the door, and we gave each other a quick look of assessment and a tentative hug.

Varena was looking good.

I had been the prettier when we were girls. My eyes are bluer, my nose is straighter, my lips are fuller. But that doesn't have much meaning for me anymore. I think it still matters very much to Varena. Her hair is long and naturally a redder brown than mine had been. She wears blue contacts, which intensify her eye color to an almost bizarre extent. Her nose turns up a little, and she is about two inches shorter, with bigger breasts and a bigger bottom.

"How is the wedding process?" I asked.

She widened her eyes and made her hands tremble. On edge.

Beyond her, I could see the tables that had been set up to accommodate the presents.