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LIFE BLOOD
It lies hidden deep in the mist-shrouded rain forest of Central America.
A place where a brilliant doctor fulfills dreams for some – and creates chilling nightmares for others.
Now, filmmaker Morgan James is about to journey straight into the heart of a dark conspiracy.
Where a bizarre human experiment comes at a terrible price, and where she may be the next to pay with her . . . Life Blood

BOOKS BY THOMAS HOOVER

Nonfiction

Zen Culture

The Zen Experience

Fiction

The Moghul

Caribbee

Wall Street Samurai

(The Samurai Strategy)

Project Daedalus

Project Cyclops

Life Blood

Syndrome

All free as e-books at

www.thomashoover.info

Thomas Hoover

PINNACLE BOOKS are published by

Kensington Publishing Corp. 850 Third Avenue New York, NY 10022

First Printing: December, 2000 10 987654321

Printed in the United States of America

ISBN: 0-7860-1313-3

Key words:

THOMAS HOOVER (Author)

LIFE BLOOD (Novel: Medical Thriller)

In Vitro, Independent Film, Adoption, Fertility, Human Eggs, Guatemala, Peten, Maya, Mayan Pyramid, Vision Serpent, Jaguar, Baalum, Mayan Mothers, Movie Making, Copal

LIFE BLOOD

[Chapter One]

New York, New York. A blissful spring morning beckoned, cloudless and blue and pure. I was driving my high-mileage Toyota down Seventh Avenue, headed for the location shoot that was supposed to wind up principal photography for my first feature film, Baby Love. It was about the pain and joy of adoption. I guess directing your first feature is something like giving birth to your first child, but that gets us way, way ahead of the story.

My name, by the way, is Morgan Smyth James, after two grandmothers, and I'm thirty-eight and single and strive to be eternally optimistic. That morning, however, in spite of everything else, I was missing Steve terribly and feeling like I'd screwed up essential components of my life.

To try for some perspective, let me say I'd always planned to have a normal, loving family. Really. Find an emotionally present soul mate who cared about things I care about—okay, slim and smart and spectacular in bed wouldn't be a minus—get married on a lawn with lots of white roses some sunny June afternoon, work one or even two perfect kids into our fulfilling, giving lives. But somehow I'd managed to have none of that. I'd messed up at every turn.

In reality I had nobody to blame but myself. Eighteen years ago, just out of college, I turned down two really nice guys. My body was fertile and hormone-driven—was it ever!—but grad school loomed and my greatest fear (instead of, as now, my fondest hope) was getting "trapped" into motherhood. Also, I had the youthful delusion that life was forever.

There was, in truth, one simpatico young director I met at NYU film school whom I would have married in a minute, but after Jason won my heart he dumped me for his undergraduate sweetheart who had skillfully gotten herself knocked up during his Christmas break.

Which was when I first developed my fallback strategy for coping with bad news. After moping around in sweats for two days, cutting class and hiding in a revival house showing a Goddard retrospective, not understanding half the French and too bleary-eyed to read the subtitles, I decided to build a defense system. From that day on, I'd put all heartbreak in a special box, nail down the lid, and act as though it wasn't there. It worked then and it still works, more or less, now. People sometimes accuse me of living in selective denial (they're right), but it makes me one heck of a survivor.

And something else. I decided then and there to focus my life: I'd concentrate on learning to make movies and let the family part just play out naturally. I had the idea that whereas men's affections couldn't be controlled, a career could. Even then I realized it was only a partial truth, but I decided to go with it anyway.

Which brings us down to three years back. And a funny thing was happening. Almost without realizing it, I'd started lingering in stores to look at little pink jumpers, begun gazing into the baby carriages that suddenly seemed to be sprouting everywhere. The phrase "my baby" became the most powerful one I could imagine, made my throat swell till I'd half choke.

At which precise time, like a deus ex machina, enter Steve Abrams, the man who gave me hope. He came along just as I was noticing that infinite stream of wonderful guys had dwindled down to relationship dropouts, men with distant eyes and former wives in other states. We discovered each other at the reopened Oloffson Hotel in Haiti, where I was shooting a documentary about voodoo and he was photographing that country's ragged, plucky children for National Geographic. No ex-spouses, no need for psychic pampering. Okay, he wasn't going to win a Mr. Universe contest any time soon; he had a couple of extra pounds that, actually, I kind of liked. But he was my age, had great brown eyes, sandy hair thinning only just a bit. No Greek god but definitely a man. He could tune a Jeep carburetor with his eyes closed or fix a cranky hotel lock, then recite Byron (sort of) and proceed to snare the perfect Chilean red for crawfish etouffee (yes!). But I knew I loved him when I realized it was more than any of that. I felt as if I'd found the other half of myself. Just one glance across the table and we each knew what the other was thinking, feeling. We'd laugh at the same instant, then as though on cue, half cry together over the miseries of that wretched island. Sometimes it was almost eerie. And as for lovemaking, let me just say Steve didn't need a how-to manual. We were made for each other.

Maybe it's un-PC to mention it, but I also felt safe around him. And I think he felt the same. We liked that feeling. Us fending off the world.

When we got back to New York, we had to see each other every day. We still had separate apartments—thanks to the New York real-estate squeeze—but we were scouting in our spare time for an affordable loft in lower Manhattan that could accommodate Steve's darkroom, my office, and—yes—a baby. We evolved into parents-to-be, pricing baby carriages. Who could have predicted it? The joy of sharing a need. It was a total high.

Before long we decided to stop waiting for the perfect

space. We'd start on the baby anyway, our first joint project—which, we believed, would only be the first of many.

But nothing happened. Over a year and still nothing.

That was when life began to feel like a cruel bait-and-switch. When you aren't ready, you can produce a baby in a momentary absence-of-mind, whereas once you're finally an adult, accomplished, lots-to-offer woman, ready to be the mother you wish you'd had, your body has closed down your baby-making equipment like an unused Rust Belt factory. Fertility has calculatingly abandoned you for the Sun Belt of youth.

"Well," Dr. Hannah Klein, my long-time ob/gyn, declared, "our tests all indicate you're both fertile, so just keep trying, under optimum conditions."

Optimum conditions. There followed almost a year of "optimum conditions." Do it upside down; wait and have a cold shower while I take my temperature; no, not that way, not tonight. My mucus is thicker: Quick! Eventually we both began feeling like laboratory rats. Our once-incredible love life drifted into something only a boot-camp sergeant with Nazi leanings could be turned on by.

I think that's what finally caused Steve to go over the edge. Three months ago—a Friday morning I shall never forget—he stepped out of my shower, swathed himself in a white towel, and announced he was going to Central America to do a book. He needed time to think. The move, he explained, wasn't about us. He really wanted to spend a year down there with his Nikon, capturing the region's tentative processes of democratic transition. Besides, he was beginning to think we'd both gone a little mental about the baby.

Out came that special box of heartbreak again. I consoled myself we were just having a seventh-inning stretch, but the wisdom in that box told me I'd somehow blown it. The baby we hadn't created had become a specter hovering in the ether between us, ever a reminder of failure.

As a parting gesture, the never-say-die long shot, he left a "deposit" with Dr. Klein—for her liquid-nitrogen womb-in-waiting—enough for two final intrauterine inseminations. Later on today I was going to see her and find out if our last and final attempt had stuck. But nothing about my cycle was giving me any hope.

In the meantime, though, I had a movie to finish. We were shooting an interview at a five-story condominium building in Greenwich Village belonging to a woman named Carly Grove, who'd recently adopted. Her story was intriguing, but now—with my own hopes of ever having a baby down to two outs in the bottom of the ninth—well, now I had more than one reason for wanting to meet her. . . .

When I arrived, I lucked into a parking space right in front. Our security guy, Lou Crenshaw, was off today getting some city paperwork sorted out, but my crew was already upstairs—as director I get to arrive at a decent hour, though later on I also get to do lonely postproduction work till midnight—leaving our three vans double-parked, with a New York City Film Board permit prominently displayed inside each windshield. The building, formerly a Hertz parking garage, was near the end of Barrow Street, facing the Hudson River, and was filled with artists and entrepreneurs.

The truth was, I wanted to get the interview on film as soon as possible. I was more than a little worried Carly might decide to get cold feet and back out. She'd started to hedge when I had one last confirming chat with her last night, something about a "no-disclosure" agreement she now remembered signing. This had to be a one-take, all-or-nothing shoot.

Which was why I'd sent down the full gang this morning, not just the "key" personnel as I'd initially planned. Leading my (motley) crew was the director of photography, first cameraman Roger Drexel, a grizzled veteran with a ponytail who'd been with my producer, David Roth and his Applecore Productions, from back when he did beach movies and splatter films. He worked with the production manager, Erica Cole, our lipstick lesbian, who coordinated crew schedules. The second camera was handled by Greer Seiber, recently of NYU film school, who was so happy to have a job, any job, she acted as though David's previous string of low-budget, B-flick epics were remakes of Gone With the Wind.

Scott Ventri, another Applecore old-timer, was key grip, the guy who got the gear on and off the vans, set it up, and signed off on safety regs. Today he also was responsible for blacking out windows and setting up lights. The chief electrician, gaffer, was Ralph Cafiero, who'd come down the previous day and temporarily hot-wired the circuit breaker in the apartment to make sure there was enough amperage. He and his lighting "crew," another bright-eyed (and cheap) NYU grad named Paul Nulty, had arrived this morning ahead of everybody else to pre-light the "set," a northeast corner of the apartment.

I'm always a little hyper about sound, so I'd asked Tony Wills, who handled recording, to also come down the previous day and record the "tone" of the living room, the sound when there is no sound, in order to have it available for editing. Today he'd run the boom mike and be assisted by Sherry Moran, his latest girlfriend, who was mixer/recordist. For Carly's makeup and hair, I had Arlene Morris, an old friend from all the way back to my early days as an AD on the soaps. . . .

I rang Carly's bell and she buzzed me right up.

She doubtless had a closet full of Donna Karan suits, but she came to the door in pre-faded jeans and a striped sweater.

A successful publicity agent, she was petite, with dark hair and eyes and an obvious don't-bug-me take on life.

"Come on in. My nanny's here to help keep Kevin out of the way." She was sounding like she'd gotten her old spunk back, or so it seemed at first. "I've completely cleared the living room."

I looked around the place, now a vision of setup pandemonium. "You're sure this is all right?"

"Well . . ." She was biting at her lip. "Maybe we ought to talk first, okay? But come on in. I'll probably do it. Maybe I just need a good reason to. . . ."

As her voice trailed off, I found myself mining my brain for a sales point. Finally, out of the blue, I settled on one. "Because you're totally crazy?"

She laughed out loud. "Not a bad start. I live in total madness. It's the definition of my life."

I laughed too and looked around. No kidding. Her loft apartment was a wild mixture of stairs and galleries and levels—unconventional in every way. Also, it had a lot of in-your-face decor, outrageous posters, and African fertility masks, signs of a wonderful, irreverent personality. Then too, stuffed animals and toys were strewn all over.

"I can't really afford the rent," she declared, seeing me survey the place, "but I need the space for Kevin. I've just joined Bloomingdale's Anonymous. Twelve steps to shredding your charge plates."

Her nanny, a Jehovah's Witness from Jamaica named Marcy (who reminded me of a cuddly voodoo doll, complete with cornrows), was bringing Carly's little boy Kevin down from his bath in the upstairs bathroom.

He was definitely adopted, sandy-haired and peachy, nothing like Carly's dark, severe strands and Mediterranean skin. When Marcy put him down, he tried to walk, and I felt my envy ratchet upward a notch. He'd just started taking tentative steps, at eleven months old, and there was still a Frankenstein quality as he strode stiff-legged, arms out for balance.

I walked over, picked him up, and gave him a kiss. He looked like a Scandinavian travel poster, a cherubic vision, and I felt a great void growing where my heart had been. Then Marcy reached out and pried him from me. I hated to let him go so much I almost pulled him back.

"You're so lucky," I said to Carly, feeling a surge of yearning. "He's great."

"You know," she said, "I've been thinking about that 'no disclosure' thing Children of Light made me sign. That's their name, by the way. Like a vow of silence about them. They seemed pretty serious about it."

Dear God, I thought, don't let her chicken out. Don't, don't.

"So, we won't mention them. Just never use their name."

She stood a minute, mute, and then her eyes grew determined. "No, I've got a better idea. I like you. And I think more single women ought to know about adoption. So you know what? I think I'll use their name all over the damned place. I paid what they asked, and for that I ought to be able to do what I want. What are they going to do? Come and steal Kevin back?"

Then she sighed and stared at me. "Maybe, though, you could run through again how exactly we fit into this movie."

I liked to tell the story to people, just to get their reaction. There are always moments of doubt in the film-making process when you wonder if the audience for your picture is going to consist entirely of your immediate family, your backers, and your creditors.

"Well, as I tried to explain before, it's a fictional construct intended to feel like a documentary, about a career slave named Gail Crea who's based on a hundred women I know. She's got a great career, manages fund-raising for a major museum, and work is going great. But then one day she finds herself suddenly daydreaming about babies, envying mothers. She yearns for someone to take care of, has a recurrent dream she's stealing a baby out of a carriage on the street. It's demeaning."

"God," Carly said, "I know exactly what you're talking about. I've been there. Have I ever."

The truth was, I also knew it all too well. It was poignant and demeaning at the same time.

"Anyway, Gail's focused on career all through her twenties, and by her late thirties she's become a serious professional. But her personal life is still on hold. She 'meets people' at work, or some other way, and she has a couple of long-standing relationships that finally crater because the guys, make that commit-ophobes, 'need space.' Along the way, there're ghastly fix-ups and dismal dinners with what seem like a hundred thousand misfits. She becomes the Dating Queen of New York, but eventually she realizes all the men she's meeting are either assuaging their midlife crises with some pneumatic bombshell named Bambi, or they're divorced and whining and carrying a ton of emotional baggage. The fact is, she's become the sensible, successful professional she's been looking for all this time. This all sort of seeps in as back story."

I perched on a stool at the breakfast bar and looked down at my jeans, and noticed that a rip was starting in the crotch. Shit, back to cottage cheese. Those horrible eight pounds I could never get rid of.

I crossed my legs. "Finally, after she gets a couple more promotions, she wakes up one morning and realizes she's never going to have a family. All the stable, rational men have disappeared. Like there's a black hole or something. Nothing's left but the walking wounded. She concludes it's actually easier to get a baby than a decent guy—which is what she starts trying to do. High concept: This picture is about how adopting a baby can enrich the life of a childless human being and, not coincidentally, bring joy to an orphaned infant."

I remembered when I'd first pitched it to David Roth of Applecore. His response had been; "Definitely art-house. Probably never get past the Angelika. A wide release is gonna be three screens where they serve iced cappuccino."

I was dead set to prove him wrong.

"So," I wound up, "I've shot the entire film, but now, thinking it over, I've decided there's one last thing I need to do. As I go through the story, at every step of the adoption process I want to cut to an interview, just talking heads, tight shot, of somebody who actually went through it. Nonfiction. The real-life happy ending. And that's where you come in."

What I wasn't telling her was, I was increasingly concerned the picture might be slightly hollow without this punch of real life.

"Well," Carly declared with a grin, "my ending couldn't be happier."

"Okay, want to get started?" I looked around at Arlene, makeup, who always seemed to have more on her face than in her bag. I kidded her about that a lot. But she was actually the one who had found Carly, bumping into her at a gym in the Village.

"Hey, let's go for it." Arlene grinned.

I turned back to Carly. "So how's about we prep a little while you're getting the 'natural' look?"

In the back of my mind I knew what I wanted for the interview. Something like the feeling I remembered from The Thin Blue Line, where people engaged in Hamlet-like monologues that told us more about them than they themselves knew, that let us really know their secrets and their fears. The interviewer was never seen or heard.

Arlene ensconced Carly at the dining room table, a weathered country French, where she'd already unfolded and plugged in a mirror with lights.

"Having Kevin has been wonderful," Carly began. "He's changed my life. Sure, being a single 'supermom' makes for a lot of bad-hair days, but no matter how much I complain, it's worth every burp."

I thought momentarily about having her hold him during the interview, but instantly decided it would be too distracting. Kevin and his wonderful eyes would commandeer the camera. A kid this cute in a scene was nothing less than grand larceny.

He came toddling in now, dragging a stuffed brown bear. Then he banged its head and tried to say its name. "Benny." His funny, awkward walk reminded me a little of Lou Crenshaw after a couple of drinks. God, he was fantastic.

"Come here, sweetie." I picked him up, inhaling his fresh baby scent, and wanted to hold him forever—while he slammed the bear against my face. This child, I thought, is too good to be true.

He was wearing a small bracelet around his left ankle, a tiny little chain, with a small silver medallion attached. It looked like the face of a cat. Funny. Carly didn't have a cat, wasn't a cat person, so why the little bracelet? And the back had a bunch of lines and dots, like a jumbled-up Morse code.

Ask her about that, I thought. But later.

Now Carly was caught up in the sound of her own voice and on a roll. While Arlene continued with the makeup, moving to her eyes, she bubbled on.

"Like I told you on the phone, I tried and tried to adopt, through a whole bunch of lawyers, but it was a nightmare. One guy even helped me put ads in newspapers all around the country, but nothing worked. I kept getting scammed by women who wanted thousands of dollars up front, then backed out at the last minute." She was getting up, looking intense. "Let me have a minute. I want to make coffee for everybody."

I followed her into the kitchen, which was the "country" type with a faux granite counter and lots of copper-bottomed pans hanging from the ceiling.

She was right about the pain of adoption, which was why her story was such a burst of sunshine. As part of the start-up research for my picture, I'd actually gone to meet an adoption attorney out in Brooklyn, a sleazy-looking guy named Frank Brasco. I'd been pretending to be a client, to find out firsthand how tough it really was. What I heard was chilling.

"I don't want to get your hopes up," he'd declared for cheery openers. "Finding a healthy, Caucasian, American baby is virtually out of the question, so naturally we focus on foreign-borns. All the same, it can take years, and there's incredible paperwork. Passports for the kid, an extended visa for you while you go there and then wait around to process everything in triplicate. Bribes, corruption, you can't imagine." He sighed and adjusted his toupee, as though the very thought made him weary. "And that's just the foreign end. Here you have the INS, the Immigration and Naturalization Service. They give bean-counting paper-pushers a bad name." He examined me closely. "Not Jewish, I take it. 'Cause if that's what you're looking for, you may have to wait for the Messiah."

Now, almost a year and a lot of experience later, I knew full well how right he was. Which was what made Carly's story so fantastic.

"So how did you manage to get Kevin? You said it only took a few months?"

"Well, to go back to the beginning, I didn't start out wanting to adopt. But when the guy I was planning to marry got cold feet—after four and a half years, the louse—and there was nobody else on the horizon, I decided to just have a baby on my own. You know, find some smart, good-looking hunk, seduce him, and get things going the old-fashioned way, or if that didn't work, then I figured I'd just go to a sperm bank. Who needs an actual man, right?"

She took out a white and green bag of coffee beans, labeled Balducci's on the side. I was still holding Kevin, who threw Benny onto the floor, then began to sniffle and point.

But Carly seemed not to notice as she shook the coffee beans into the grinder. "Well, getting a baby the fun way turned out to be moot, because it seems I have some kind of uterine condition—which meant I couldn't get pregnant, or even do an in vitro. Bottom line, if I wanted a baby, I had to adopt."

She pressed the button on the coffee grinder, sending a blast of whirring through the kitchen. In seconds it was over and she was tapping the batch into her Braun. "So that's when I started on the attorney thing, got worked over good trying to adopt as a single mom, and finally heard about Children of Light."

"The adoption organization? What do you know about them?"

"Tell you the main thing," she said, "they're the place that can make it happen." She reached over and poked Kevin's tummy. "Right, big guy?"

Sure looked that way. What a cutie.

By now the spacious living room had been turned into a mini film set, with two 35-mm Panaflex cameras set up, windows blanked out, lights and filters in place, and a video camera and monitor. Having tested the boom mike and the tape recorder, Tony and Sherry were ready.

Carly announced to everybody that coffee was available, and I handed Kevin over to Marcy. Then together we marched into the living room.

"Okay," I told her, "we're going to be filming, but ignore that fact. Just look into the back of the camera and talk to it as though it were me."

"Hey." She grinned. "You're dealing with a pro. This is my thing."

I looked around at the cameras and the grips. "Okay, guys. Roll sound." There was a retort as the clap stick used for synching whacked out the start of the shoot. "Scene one, take one, Carly Grove interview."

She proceeded to hit the ground running, recounting in great detail her story of many disappointments. She finally got to the point where she was trying to adopt the baby of a woman in a Memphis jail, and then even that fell through.

"Which was when my main lawyer, Chuck, just gave up and recommended I hock the family silver, take a Valium, and try this place called Children of Light. Where you go when all else fails. So I gave them a call."

"And what happened?" It sounded too good to be true. "Did they seem . . . in any way unusual?"

She looked at me, as though puzzled by the question. Then she shrugged it off. "Well, first they tried to get me to check into their clinic—it's this place up the Hudson—to let them see if my 'condition' could be cured somehow, using his special techniques."

"His?"

"Goddard. Dr. Alex Goddard. He's a kinda spacey guy, but he's the big-shot presiding guru there." She remembered the camera and turned back to it. "I told his staff I didn't have that kind of time, and anyway nothing could be done. They were pretty insistent, so I eventually ended up talking to the man himself. He sort of mesmerizes you, but I finally said, forget it, it's adoption or nothing. So he just sent me back to the peons. Checkbook time."

I stared at her, hungry for details, but she didn't notice, just pressed on.

"The money they wanted, I have to tell you, was staggering. Sixty thousand. And believe me, they don't give revolving credit."

I thought about the figure. It was the highest I'd heard for getting a baby, but it wasn't totally off-the-wall. Terrific babies don't drop from trees.

Carly was still going strong. "It took me almost half a year to scrounge it together. A lot of credit lines got maxed. But when I finally did plunk down the loot, sure enough, I had Kevin in less than three months. I don't even know where he came from. They took care of all that, but I do know it was probably out of the country, because of the blank INS forms I signed. But then, who cares? With a deal this good, you don't press for details, right?"

Carly Grove had a mutual love affair with the camera. The footage was going to be fabulous. The only problem was, it sounded like an "infomercial" for the adoption miracle wrought by this doctor named Goddard.

When the interview began to wind down, losing its punch, I suggested we call it a day. With the time pushing two o'clock, I wanted to get the film to the lab, get it developed, and take a look at the rushes. I also had a doctor's appointment, not to mention a meeting with David to bring him up to speed on what I was doing. But surely he was going to be pleased. The interview, with Carly's honest intensity, would give the picture spine and guts. Just as I'd hoped.

You could always tell by the reaction of the crew. Even Roger Drexel, who usually hid his thoughts somewhere in his scraggly beard, was letting his eyes sparkle behind his Panaflex. Scott was also grinning as he struck the lights and Cafiero ripped up the power lines, now taped to the floor. Everybody was in wrap mode, flushed with a great shoot.

I followed Carly into the kitchen, where Marcy was feeding Kevin some Gerber applesauce. The time had come, I thought, to spring the next big question, out of earshot of the crew.

"I hate to put you on the spot, but do you know any other women like you, single, who've adopted through Children of Light?" I decided to experiment with the truth. "God knows, depending on what happens in my own situation, I'm . . . I'm thinking I might even want to check them out for myself."

"What do you mean?" She gave me a quick, concerned look.

"Maybe I'd like to talk to them about adopting too." I realized I was babbling, my usual prelude to obsessing.

Carly's worried gaze eased up a bit, but she started twisting at her hair.

"Well, I might have another name. When my lawyer first told me about them, he gave me the name of another woman who'd adopted from them, and I talked to her a little about how they worked. She'd just gotten her baby, so I guess she was about six months ahead of me in the process. Her name was . . . I think it was Pauline or Paula or something. She's probably not the kind of person who'd take their 'no disclosure' crap all that seriously. She was adopting a girl, and she lives somewhere on the Upper West Side."

"Any idea how I could find her?"

"You know, she wrote kids' books, and I think she gave me her card. In case I ever needed somebody to do some YA copy. Let me go look in my Rolodex. I filed her card under 'Y' for Young Adult. Right. It'll just take a second."

The woman, whose name was Paula Marks, lived on West 83rd Street. The business card, a tasteful brown with a weave in the paper, described her as an author. The address included a "suite" number, which meant she worked out of her apartment.

"Mind if I take down her phone number and address? I'd really like to look her up. To see if her experience was anything remotely like yours."

Carly gazed at her fingernails a second. "Okay, but do me a favor. Don't tell her how you got her number." She bit her lip, stalling. "It's one thing for me to talk to you myself. It's something else entirely to go sticking my nose into other people's business."

"Look, I'll respect her privacy just as much as I respect yours." I paused, listening to what I'd just said. The promise sounded pretty lame. I'd just filmed her, or hadn't she noticed? "Look, let me call Paula, see if she'll agree to be interviewed on camera. I'll keep your name entirely out if it, I promise."

She reached down and plucked Kevin out of his high chair, kissed him on his applesauce-smeared cheek, then hugged him. "Sorry. Guess I'm being a little paranoid. I shouldn't invite you here, then give you a hard time about what you're going to do, or not do. I can't have it both ways."

In the ensuing tumult and confusion of the wrap, I did manage to get one more item from Carly Grove. The address and phone number of Children of Light. But I completely forgot the one thing I'd been meaning to ask about. That little amulet, with the strange cat's face and the lines and dots on the back. Why was Kevin wearing it? And by the time I got to the street, surrounded by the clamor of crew and equipment, it seemed too inconsequential to go back and bother with.

[Chapter Two]

Moving on, my next stress-point was to meet with my young boss, the afore-noted David Roth, who was CEO and First Operating Kvetcher of Applecore Productions, a kinda-sexy guy whose heart was deeply engaged, often unsuccessfully, with bottom lines. The issue was, I'd done today's shoot, the interview with Carly, without troubling to secure his okay. Without, in fact, telling him zip—the reason being I was afraid he wouldn't green-light the idea. Now my next move was to try to convince him what I'd just done was brilliant.

Actually I liked David a lot, and hoped the occasional tangles we'd had over the film wouldn't stand in the way of a friendship. The truth is, you don't meet that many interesting, stable men in my line of work. Our artistic goals weren't always in sync, but all the same, he'd done an enormous favor for somebody close to me and for that I'd vowed to walk through fire for him.

When I marched into his cluttered, dimly lit office, my mind still churning over Carly's strange adoption story, what I saw sent my problem-detector straight into the red. There, sitting across from him, was Nicholas Russo, a five-seven smoothie in a charcoal Brioni double-breasted, the gentleman David sometimes referred to as Nicky the Purse. Another land mine in my life. He operated off and on as Applecore's "banker" when cash flow got dicey and real banks got nervous. It was an arrangement of last resort, since Nicky's loans had to be serviced at two percent a week. Do the numbers: He doubled his money in a year. I knew too that putting money out to independent filmmakers was part of Nicky's attempt at a legitimate front; the real cash went onto the streets of Hell's Kitchen, just outside our door, where he got five percent a week. And Nicky's overdue notices were not sent through the mail.

He also had a piece of a video distributorship, Roma Exotics, that reputedly specialized in . . . guess what. It was all stuff I tried not to think about.

I had a strong hunch what was under discussion. The $350,000 David had borrowed to finish my picture. We'd gotten the loan three months ago, when cash was tight, and we both figured we could pay it back later in the year, after we got a backup cable deal (though I was ultimately hoping for a theatrical distribution, my first).

Shit! What did Nicky want? Were we behind on the weekly juice? I'd signed on with David partly to help his bottom line. Was I instead going to cause his ruin?

At the moment he had his back to Nicky, seemed to be meditating out the window he loved, its vista being the grimy facades that lined the far west of Fifty-eighth Street. His office, with its wide windows and forest of freshly misted trees, told you he was a plant nut. Outside it was early April, the cruelest month, but inside, with all the trees, spring was in full cry. The place also felt like a storage room, with piles of scripts stacked around every pot. The office normally smelled like a greenhouse, but now the aroma was one of high anxiety.

David revolved back and looked across the potted greenery, then broke into a relieved smile when he saw me. I could tell from his faraway stare that he was teetering on the verge of panic.

"Hey, come on in," he said. "Nicky's just put a brand-new proposition on the table."

David had a keen intelligence, causing me to sometimes wonder if he was in a line of work beneath him. (For that matter, maybe I was too.) He was dark-haired, trim, with serious gray eyes and strong cheekbones. This morning he was wearing his trademark black sweater, jeans, and white sneakers, a picture of the serious go-for-broke New York indy-prod hustler. He'd already made and lost and made several fortunes in his youthful career. My only sexual solace since Steve left was an occasional glance at his trim rear end. I also saluted his fiscal courage. His congenital shortfall, I regret to say, was in the matter of judgment. Exhibit A: Nicholas Russo's funny money.

"Nicky, you remember Morgan James, the director on this project."

"Yeah, we met. 'Bout four months back." Nicky rose and offered his manicured hand, a picture of Old World charm. His dark hair was parted down the middle and his Brioni, which probably fell off a truck somewhere in the Garment Center, had buttons on the cuffs that actually buttoned. "How ya doing?"

"Hi." I disengaged myself as quickly as possible. The slimeball.

Again, why was he here? The way I understood it, we'd signed a legitimate, ironclad note. Nicky wasn't exactly the Chase Manhattan Bank, but I assumed he was a "man of honor," would live by any deal David had with him. "Do we have some kind of problem?"

"Nah," Nicky said, "I'm thinking of it more in the way of an opportunity. Dave, here, showed me some of your picture this morning, and it ain't too bad. Got me to thinking. You're gonna need a video distributor. So maybe I could help you out."

Oh, shit and double-shit. I looked at him, realizing what he had in mind. "How's that? Applecore already has a video distributor. We use—"

"Yeah, well, like I was telling Dave, I got a nose this picture's gonna do some serious business." He tried a smile. "Whenever I see one of these indy things that don't add up for me, like this one, I always know it's a winner. What I'm telling you is, I think you got something here. He says you're figuring on a cable deal, and maybe a theatrical release, but after that you gotta worry about video. I'm just thinking a way I could pitch in."

Pitch in? The last thing I needed was some skin-flick wiseguy getting his sticky hands on my picture. Forget about it.

"Well, I don't really see how. I'm shooting this one by the book. I've got a standard Screen Actors Guild contract, and everything is strictly by the rules. If we're current on the loan, then . . ." I looked at David, who appeared to be running on empty. Maybe, I thought, I didn't understand what was at stake. What had Nicky said to him? This was a man who could make people disappear with a phone call to guys nicknamed after body parts. "Look, let me talk to David about this. I don't know what—"

"You two're just gonna 'talk' about it?" Russo's penetrating eyes dimmed. "Now that's a little disappointing, I gotta tell you, since I sent for my business manager, Eddie down there in the car, hoping we could reach a meeting of minds right here. Sign a few things. Roll that note I'm holding into a distribution deal and give everybody one less worry." He turned in his chair, boring in on me. "Like, for instance, I checked out your locations and I noticed there ain't no Teamsters nowhere. All you got's a bunch of fuckin' Mick scabs driving them vans. Now that can lead to circumstances. Inadequate safety procedures. Of course, that wouldn't have to be a concern if we was partners together. Then you'd have good security. The best."

I looked at David, who seemed on the verge of a heart attack. Why was he letting this even be discussed? Get in bed with Nicky Russo and the next thing you know he's got somebody hanging you out the window by your ankles.

Besides, ten to one the guy was bluffing, seeing if he could scare us.

I refocused. "Mr. Russo, it may ease your mind to know that our security is managed by a former agent for the FBI. He was with them here in New York till about a year ago, when he came to us full time. His name is Agent Lou Crenshaw. You're welcome to check him out. He's familiar with union issues, and he carries a .38. He also has plenty of friends down at 26 Federal Plaza. So if you have any lingering concern about our security procedures, why don't you run it by him?"

The mention of Lou seemed to brighten David's listless eyes. He leaned back in his chair and almost smiled.

He had good reason. The favor he'd done for Lou, and indirectly for me, was enough to inspire eternal loyalty. Lou would face off against half of Hell's Kitchen for David Roth.

"That ain't the point, exactly," Russo said, shifting uncomfortably. "Thing is, Roma could do good distribution for you. We work with a lot of people."

"Then why not submit a formal proposal? In writing. I'm in charge and that's how I do business. If your numbers work, then we can talk."

"Just trying to be helpful." He glared at me, then seemed to dismiss my presence. I disappeared from his radar as though lifted away by an alien spacecraft, and he turned back to David. "You know, Dave, me and you've kinda drifted apart lately. Old friends oughtn'ta do that. We ought to keep more in touch. I think we get along okay."

In other words, get this pushy broad out of my face.

"It's just business, Nicky," David said, trying to conjure an empty smile. "Business and pleasure don't always mix."

Yes! David, tell the creep to leave us alone. Tell him.

"Doing business with me ain't a pleasure?" Nicky Russo asked, hurt filling his voice. He'd brought out a large Havana and was rolling it in between his thumb and forefinger. "I figured we was best friends. Paisans."

"We're not not friends, Nicky. We've just got different goals in life. You know how it is."

I worked my way around behind his desk and glanced out the window. The lingering day was beginning to cloud over, a perfect match for my state of mind. After this I had a late appointment with Dr. Hannah Klein. I feared she was going to end my baby hopes.

"Yeah, well," Nicky Russo said finally, rising, "I gotta be downtown in a little while, so I guess we can talk about this later."

"Okay, sure." David made a shrugging sign. Like: Women! What can you do? Then he got up too. "Look, Nicky, let me chew on this. Maybe I'll get back to you."

"Yeah, you think about it, all right?" He rose without a further word and worked his way out the wide double doors, stumbling through the ficus forest as he struck a match to his cigar.

"David, don't sign anything with him. Don't. I'll handle the Teamster stuff if it comes up. I know how to talk to them."

"Okay, okay, calm down. He was just seeing if he could push me. I know him. You called his scam with that talk about Lou. By tomorrow he'll forget about the whole thing." He looked at me, his eyes not quite yet back in focus. "Thanks. You can say things to him I'd get cement shoes for. Nicky's not really ready for people like you. He has this macho front, but he doesn't know how to handle a professional woman with balls."

"You're welcome. I guess." Balls? I adored those vulnerable male bits, but I preferred not to think of myself in those terms. Truth was, Nicky Russo played a large part in my personal anxieties. "But I mean it. N. O."

"I hear you," he said, sighing. Then he snapped back to the moment. "So where do things stand otherwise?"

I'd come for an after-the-fact green light of the day's shoot, but already I was thinking about Hannah Klein. "David, I'm going to find out in about an hour whether Steve and I are ever going to have a baby. But truthfully I don't think I'm pregnant. I think it's over." It hurt to say it. He knew about Steve and me—I'd written some language on maternity leave into my contract—and I think he was mildly rooting for us. Or maybe not.

"Could be it's all for the best," he declared. He'd sat back down, picked up a pencil off his desk to distract himself, and was whirling it pensively, one of his few habits that made me crazy. "Maybe you were destined to make movies, not kids."

I listened to his tone of voice, knowing he often hid his real feelings with safe, sympathy-card sentiments. He rose to eloquence only when nothing much was at stake. He'd even sent me flowers and a mea-culpa note twice as a makeup after we'd had a disagreement over costs and scheduling. And one of those times, I should have sent him flowers. Sometimes I wondered why we worked so well together. The truth was, we operated on very different wavelengths.

Some history to illustrate. Over the past eight years, before I teamed up with David, I'd done three "highly praised" documentaries. But getting to that point meant busting my behind for years and years at the lower end of the professional food chain. After NYU, I toiled as a script supervisor on PBS documentaries, about as close to grunt work as it comes. Eventually I got a fling as a production assistant, assembling crews, but then the money dried up. (Thank you, Jesse Helms.) Whereupon I decided to try capitalism, working for three years as an AD on the soaps: first Guiding Light, then As the World Turns, then Search for Tomorrow. I can still hear the horrible music. Then a connection got me a slot at A&E as a line producer. Eight months later the series got canceled, which was when I decided the time had come to take my career into my own hands. I hocked every last credit card, went to Japan, and made a documentary. The result: I was an "overnight" success. Men started addressing me by my name.

My first film was about the impact of Zen on Japanese business. As part of my research, I shaved my head and lived three months at a Kyoto temple, eating bean curd three meals a day, after which I had enough credibility to land long interviews with Tokyo CEOs. I then sold the edited footage to A&E. When it became a critical hit, they financed a second film, about the many gods of India and how they impact everything about the place. There, I also got caught up in the mystical sensuality of ragas, Indian classical music, and took up the violin (one of my major professional mistakes). Next I moved on to Mexico's southern Yucatan to film a day in the life of a Maya village for the Discovery Channel. They wanted me to add some footage from Guatemala, but I scouted the country and decided it was too scary. Instead, I spent several months in Haiti filming voodoo rituals, again for A&E. And met Steve.

Then one day I checked my bank account and realized that, financially speaking, I was a "flop d'estime." I was doing the kind of work that does more for your reputation than your retirement plan. I decided to go more mainstream and see what happened. But to do that I needed a commercial partner, a backer.

Ironically enough, when I first teamed up with David, he had bottom-line problems too, but from the opposite direction. He was busy disproving the adage that nobody ever lost money underestimating the taste of the American public. He knew something was wrong, but what?

Apparently, when he started out, somebody told him cable audiences possessed an insatiable appetite for bare-skin-and- jiggle. Hey, he figured, that stuff he could grind out in his sleep. His first, and last, epic in the skin genre was Wet T-Shirt Weekend, whose title says it all. He explained the economics to me once, still baffled why the picture hadn't worked. He'd assumed all you had to do was find a bunch of nineteen-year-olds who looked like they're sixteen, go nonunion someplace down South with a beach, and take care the wardrobe trailer has nothing but string bikinis. "Cost only a million-eight to make," he declared with pride, "but every penny is on the screen."

He insisted I watch it, perplexed that it was universally regarded as a turkey. It was a painful experience, so much so I actually began to wonder if his heart was really in it. (The great schlockmeisters secretly think they're Fellini; they're operating at the top of their form, not consciously pandering.)

Chastened financially, he decided to move into low-budget action-adventure. His efforts, most notably Virtual Cop, had car chases, blue-screen explosions, buckets of fake blood. Somebody died creatively in every scene.

They did business in Asia and Southern Europe, but he was dumbfounded when nobody at HBO or Showtime would return his calls. It gnawed at his self-esteem.

That was the moment we found each other. He'd just concluded he needed somebody with a quality reputation to give

Applecore an image makeover, and I'd realized I needed somebody who knew more than I did about the mechanics of making and distributing independent films.

We were an odd couple. I finally shook hands on the partnership after he caved in and agreed I could do anything I wanted, so long as it looked mainstream enough to get picked up by Time-Warner or somebody else legit. Well, quasi-legit. We both agreed on no more bikinis and no more films about places that required cholera shots. It was something of a compromise on both our parts.

Thus far, though, we were getting along. Maybe luck was part of it, but Baby Love was still on schedule and on budget. And I already had a deal nearly in the bag with Lifetime, the women's channel, that would just about cover the costs. Everything after that would be gravy. Again, hope hope. Maybe not the theatrical release I'd been praying for, but good enough—so he had to smile and not give me a hard time about the money I'd just spent. Had to, right?

I took a deep breath.

"David, I did a little extra shooting this morning that's kind of. . . outside the plan. But it's really important. Want to hear about it?"

"What! I thought you were finished with principal photography." He looked disoriented, the deer in the headlights. Hints of extra crew time always had that effect on him. "You're saying this wasn't in the budget?"

"Just listen first, okay?" Like a politician, I avoided giving him a direct answer. I told him about the interview with Carly and the reason for it.

"Nice of you to share the news with me." His eyes narrowed. "I think we've got some big-time communication issues here."

"Look, don't worry. I'll figure out how to save some money somewhere else."

"Morgy, before we continue this unnerving conversation, we've got to have a serious review of the matter of cash flow." He frowned, then went back to whirling the pencil, his hair backlighted from the wide window, his eyes focused on its stubby eraser as though he'd just discovered a new strain of bacteria. "So let me break some news regarding the current budget."

He put down the pencil, adjusted its location on his desk, and looked up. "I didn't want to have to upset you, since the picture seems to be going so well, but we've drawn down almost all our cash. I actually think that's why Nicky was here today, sniffing around, wanting to see a rough cut. He's got a keen nose for indy cash-flow trouble."

"What are you saying?" It was unsettling to see David turning so serious. "Are we—?"

"I'm saying we can cover the payroll here, all our fixed nut, even Nicky's vig, for maybe six more weeks, if you and I don't pay ourselves. Of course, if we can get an advance on some kind of cable deal, that would tide us over more comfortably till this thing is in the can. But right now we're sailing pretty close on the wind. I've bet Applecore on your picture, Morgan. We can't screw this up."

I swallowed hard. I knew we were working on the edge, but I didn't know the edge was down to six weeks.

"David, I'm all but ready for postproduction. I'm just thinking I may need one more interview. Just a one-day shoot. I'm going to make this picture work. You'll see."

He sighed. "All right, if you think it's essential, get the footage. Maybe I can even shake another fifty out of Nicky, if I string him along about the distribution deal—don't look so alarmed, I won't go through with it. Anyway, I can tell he's impressed with the picture so far. Happy now?"

No, I wasn't happy. What was I going to do if Hannah Klein had bad news? Adoption? I finally was facing the fact I'd possibly been making a movie about myself all this time. Like Yeats, penning his own tombstone. "Cast a cold eye, on life, on death. ."

So why not give him the whole story?

"David, if it turns out Steve and I can't have a baby, I've begun thinking about trying to adopt." There it was. More pain. "Maybe I'm about to become the heroine of my own picture."

He stared at me incredulously.

"Morgy, you of all people should know by now that adopting would take up all your energy, like a giant sponge. Come on. I've seen your dailies. I got it, about how hard it is. You telling me now you didn't get it?"

He was right. Righter than he realized. But then I thought again about Carly Grove, who'd found Kevin in no time at all, with zero hassles. The only troubling part was that it was all so mysterious. . . .

After I left David's office, I remembered I hadn't actually had lunch, so I grabbed two hot dogs with sauerkraut (okay, it was junk, but I secretly loved kosher franks) and a Diet Pepsi to go, from one of the striped-umbrella vendors, then hailed a cab clutching the grungy brown bag.

I was heading for Hannah Klein's office on the Upper West Side. And now I had another clock ticking in addition to the biological one. The big money clock in the sky was suddenly on final countdown.

[Chapter Three]

It took only a few minutes for Hannah Klein's assistant, Lori, to run the pregnancy test that confirmed my suspicions and settled my future. Steve's and my final attempt, another intrauterine insemination (IUI, med-speak for an expensive "turkey baster") with the last of his deposit, had failed. The end. The bitter end.

"Morgan," Hannah declared, staring over her desk, her raspy New York voice boring through me like a drill, "given how this has all turned out, maybe you ought to just start considering adoption—if having a child still means that much to you."

Hannah Klein was pushing seventy, a chain smoker who should have been dead a decade ago, and she unfailingly spoke the truth. Her gaze carried only synthetic solace, but I was probably her fifteenth patient of the day and maybe she was running low on empathy. Oddly, though, sitting there in her office, miserable, I felt strangely liberated. I adored the woman, a child of the Holocaust, with layers of steel like a samurai sword, but I also loved the thought of never again having to go through the humiliation of cowering in her straight-backed office chair, like a so-so student on probation waiting to receive my failing grade.

It was now time to come to grips with what I'd known in my heart for a long time. God had made me a theoretically functional reproductive machine that just wouldn't kick over. Translation: no cysts, fibroids, polyps, no ovulatory abnormalities. My uterus and Fallopian tubes were just fine, Steve's sperm counts were okay, but no baby was swimming into life inside me.

Sometimes, however, reality asks too much. It's not easy getting your mind around the idea that some part of your life is over, finally over. The baby part. To admit that it's time to move on to Plan B, whatever that is. Such realizations can take a while, especially if you've been living with high-level hope, no matter how irrational.

"I frankly don't know what else we can do," she went on, projecting through my abyss of gloom. She was shuffling papers on her ash-strewn desk, white hair in a bun, fine-tuned grit in her voice. Upper West Side, a fifty-year fixture. She never wore perfume, but to me she always smelled faintly of roses mixed with smoke. Earthy. "Aside from trying in vitro."

We'd already discussed that, but it was definitely the bottom level of Hell. Besides, I was running out of money, and spirit. And now, with Steve gone, the whole idea seemed moot anyway.

"So," she concluded, "barring that, we've done everything possible, run every test there is, both on you and on your . . ."

"Steve," I inserted into her pause. She seemed to deliberately block his name at crucial moments. Maybe she thought I could have done better. Maybe a nice solid dentist who owned a suit instead of some freelance photo jock who showed up for his sperm counts wearing khaki safari shirts. Well, let her deal with it.

". . . and I can't find anything. Sometimes, the body just won't cooperate. We may never know why. You've got to face that. But still, adoption is always an option."

Adoption. All along I'd told myself I didn't have the courage, or the heart. Making movies is a full-time job, not leaving time to go filling out forms and jumping through hoops for years and years. And to cap it off, I was just two years short of the big four-oh and financially struggling—hardly an adoption agency's profile of "ideal."

But now, now I'd just discovered Carly Grove and the miracle of Children of Light. So maybe there really could be a way to adopt a beautiful child with no hassles. Maybe it would simplify everything to the point I could actually pull it off. Could this be my Plan B? Then what if Steve came back? Could we be a family finally?

I wasn't used to being that lucky. And I still wanted Hannah Klein's thoughts, a reality test, which was why I pressed her on the point.

"Truthfully, do you think adopting is really a workable idea for somebody like me? Would I—?"

"Morgan, I know you're making a film about the realities of the adoption process. We both realize it's not easy." She must have seen something needful in my eyes, because she continued on, adding detail, letting the well-known facts convey the bad news. "As you're well aware, finding a young, healthy, American baby nowadays is all but impossible. At the very least it can take years." She was fiddling with some papers on her desk, avoiding my eyes. Then she stubbed out her cigarette in a gesture that seemed intended to gain time. "And even if you're willing to take a baby that's foreign-born, there still can be plenty of heartbreak. That's just how it is."

"I'd always thought so too," I said. "It's actually the underlying motif of my picture. But today I had an incredible experience. I filmed an interview of a single woman, early forties, who just adopted a baby boy. It took less than three months and he's blond and blue-eyed and perfect. I saw him, I held him, and I can assure you he's as American as peach cobbler. The way she tells it, the whole adoption process was a snap. Zero hassles and red tape."

"That's most exceptional." She peered at me dubiously. "Actually more like impossible. Frankly, I don't believe it. This child must have been kidnapped or something. How old, exactly, was he when she got him?"

"I don't know. Just a few weeks, I think."

Her eyes bored in. "This woman, whoever she is, was very, very lucky. If what she says is true."

"The organization that got the baby for her is called Children of Light," I went on. "That's all I know, really. I think it's up the Hudson somewhere, past the Cloisters. Have you ever heard of them?"

Dr. Hannah Klein, I knew, was pushing three score and ten, had traveled the world, seen virtually everything worth seeing. In younger years she was reputed to have had torrid liaisons with every notable European writer on the West Side. Her list of conquests read like an old New Yorker masthead. If only I looked half that great at her age. But whatever else, she was unflappable. Good news or bad, she took it and gave it with grace. Until this moment. Her eyes registered undisguised dismay.

"You can't mean it. Not that place. All that so-called New Age . . . are you really sure you want to get involved in something like that?"

I found myself deeply confused. Were we talking about the same thing? Then I remembered Carly had said something about an infertility clinic.

"Frankly, nobody knows the first thing about that man," Hannah raged on. "All you get is hearsay. He's supposedly one of those alternative-medicine types, and a few people claim he's had some success, but it's all anecdotal. My own opinion is, it's what real physicians call the 'placebo effect.' If a patient believes hard enough something will happen, some of the time it actually might. For God's sake, I'm not even sure he's board-certified. Do yourself a favor and stay away. Oftentimes, people like that do more harm than good." Then her look turned inquisitive. "Did you say he's providing children for adoption now? That's peculiar. When did he start that?"

Was I hearing some kind of professional jealousy slipping out? Hannah Klein was definitely Old School to the core.

"He who?" I was trying to remember the name of the doctor Carly had mentioned. "You mean—"

"He says his name is . . . what? Goddard? Yes, Alex Goddard. He's—"

My pager chirped, interrupting her, and she paused, clearly annoyed. I looked down to see a number I knew well. It had to be Lou Crenshaw, our aforementioned security guard. He'd been off today, but there was only one reason he would page me: some kind of news from Lenox Hill.

Maybe it was good news about Sarah! My hopes soared.

Or maybe it was bad. Please, dear God.

"I'm sorry, Dr. Klein. I've got to go. Right now. It could be a medical emergency."

She nodded, then slid open the top drawer of her desk and handed me a list of adoption agencies. "All right, here, take this and look it over. I've dealt with some of them, letters of reference for patients like you." She must have realized the insensitivity of that last quip, because she took my hand and squeezed it, the closest we'd ever come to intimacy. "Let me know if I can help you, Morgan. Really."

Grasping the lifeless paper, I ached for Steve all over again. Times like this, you need some support. I finally glanced down at the list as I headed out. Sure enough, Children of Light was nowhere to be seen.

Why not? I wondered. They'd found Kevin, a lovely blond baby boy, for Carly, a single woman, in no time at all. They

sounded like miracle-makers, and if there was ever a moment for miracles, this was it. Shouldn't they at least have been given a footnote?

I wanted to stalk right back and demand to know the real reason she was so upset, but I truly didn't want to waste a moment.

Lou had paged me from a pay phone—he didn't actually have a cell phone of his own—and I recognized the number as belonging to the phone next to the Lenox Hill Hospital's third-floor nurses' station. When I tried it, however, it was busy, so I decided to just get in my car and drive there as fast as I could.

And as I battled the traffic down Broadway, I realized that by diverting my mind from my own trivial misery to the genuine tragedy of Sarah, I was actually getting my perspective back. That was one of the many things Sarah had done for me over the years.

All right. Sarah and Lou, who figure so largely in this, deserve a full-dress introduction, so obviously I should start by admitting I'd known them all my life. Lou was my mother's half brother, three years younger than she was, who came along after my grandfather widowed my grandmother in a freak tractor rollover and she remarried a lifelong bachelor neighbor. (I have old snapshots of them, and I can tell you they all were cheerless, beady-eyed American Gothics.) I'd arranged for David to hire Lou eight months earlier, not too long after I came to Applecore. At that time he'd just taken early retirement from the FBI, because of an event that shook us all up pretty seriously.

For some time now, Lou's been a rumpled, Willy Loman figure, like a traveling salesman on the skids, shirts frayed at the collars, face tinted from a truckload of Early Times. Over the past fifteen years I'd watched his waist size travel from about thirty-three inches to thirty-seven, and I'd guess it's been at least a decade since a barber asked him if he needed any off the top. Natalie Rose, his spirited, wiry wife of thirty-seven years, succumbed to ovarian cancer seven years ago last September, and I know for a fact she was the one who bought his shirts, provided him with general maintenance.

My first memories of him were when he was a county sheriff in a little burg called Coleman, smack in the middle of Texas, some fifty-five long, dusty miles from the ranch where I grew up. When I was about fourteen, I remember he gave up on that and moved to Dallas, there to enter training for the FBI. He eventually ended up in New Orleans, and then, after Natalie Rose passed away and he more or less fell apart, he got transferred to New York, considered the elephant graveyard of an FBI career.

Probably the reason I saw him as much as I did as a kid was because of my cousin Sarah, his and Rose's only child. She was six years younger than me, a lot when you're kids, but we were very special to each other, had a kind of bonding that I've never really known with anybody since. We spent a lot of time staying at each other's house, me the almost-grown-up, and truthfully, I loved her helplessly, like a little sister. I always wanted to think she needed me, which can be the most affirming feeling in the world. I do know I needed her.

She was now lying in a coma, and the way she got there was the tragedy of my life, and Lou's. To begin with, though, let me say Sarah was a pretty blonde from the start, with sunshiny hair that defined her as perpetually optimistic—and who wouldn't be, given the heads she always turned. (I was—am—blond too, though with eyes more gray than her turquoise blues, but for me blond's always been, on balance, an affliction: Sexist film producers assume, dammit, that you're a failed showgirl, or worse. I've actually dyed it brunette from time to time in hopes of being taken more seriously.) Sarah and I had always had our own special chemistry, like a composite of opposites to make a complete, whole human being. Whereas I was the rational, left-brained slave of the concrete, she was a right-brained dweller in a world of what-might-be. For years and years, she seemed to live in a dream universe of her own making, one of imagination and fanciful states.

Once, when she was five, Lou hid in his woodworking shop for a month and made an elaborate cutaway dollhouse to give her at Christmas. But when I offered to help her find little dolls that would fit into it, she declared she only wanted angels to live there. So we spent the rest of the winter—I dropped everything—hunting down Christmas tree ornaments that looked like heavenly creatures. She'd swathe them in tinsel and sit them in balls of cotton she said were little clouds.

I always felt that just being around her opened my life to new dimensions, but her dream existence constantly drove Lou and Rose to distraction. I think it was one of the reasons he never got as close to her as he wanted, and his feelings about that were deep frustration, and hurt. He loved her so much, but he could never really find a common wavelength.

Finally she came down to earth enough to start college, and eventually she graduated from SMU in biology, then enrolled at Columbia for premed. By then she was interested in the workings of the brain, in altered states. I didn't know if it was just more pursuit of fantasy, but at least she was going about it professionally.

Anyway, when Lou got transferred to New York, he was actually delighted, since it gave him a chance to be closer to her. We all managed to get together for family reunions pretty often, though Lou and Sarah were talking past each other half the time.

Then tragedy struck. She was just finishing her master's, and had been accepted by Cornell Medical—Lou was bursting with pride—when he suggested they use her Christmas break to drive back down to Texas together, there to visit Rose's grave. (I think he really wanted to show off his budding doctor-to-be to the family.) Sarah was driving when they crossed the state line into Louisiana and were side-swiped by a huge Mack eighteen-wheeler, which was in the process of jackknifing across a frozen patch of interstate. They were thrown into the path of an oncoming car, and when the blood and snow were cleared, a six-year-old girl in the other vehicle was dead.

The result was Sarah decided she'd taken a human life. Her own minor facial cuts—which Lou immediately had repaired with plastic surgery—somehow evolved into a major disfigurement of her soul. All her mental eccentricities, which had been locked up somewhere when she started college, came back like a rush of demons loosed from some Pandora's box deep in her psyche. She dropped out of school, and before long she was in the throes of a full-scale mental meltdown. She disappeared, and in the following two years Lou got exactly one card from her, postmarked in San Francisco with no return address. He carried it with him at all times and we both studied it often, puzzling over the New Age astrological symbol on the front. The brief note announced she'd acquired "Divine Energy" and was living on a new plane of consciousness.

Then eight months ago, the State Department notified Lou she was missing in Guatemala. She'd overstayed her visa and nobody knew where she was.

So how did her "new plane of consciousness" land her in Central America? Was that part of the fantasy world she'd now returned to? Lou still worked downtown at 26 Federal Plaza, but he immediately took a leave of absence and, though he spoke not a syllable of Spanish, plunged down there to look for her.

He was there a month, following false leads, till he finally

ran into a Reverend Ben Jackson, late of a self-styled Protestant ministry in Mississippi, who was one of the ardent new Evangelicals swarming over Central America. The man mentioned that some chicle harvesters in the northwest Peten Department of Guatemala had found a young woman in an old dugout canoe on the Guatemala side of the wide Usumacinta River, near a tributary called the Rio Tigre, lodged in amongst overhanging trees. She'd been struck on the head and presumably set adrift somewhere upriver, left for dead. She was now in a coma, resting at Jackson's "Jesus es el Hombre" clinic, also located deep in the northwest Peten rain forest. He had no idea who she was.

Lou rented a car and drove there, almost a day on unpaved roads. It was Sarah.

Thus she was no longer missing; she was now the apparent victim of an attempted murder. However, rather than being helpful, the local policia appeared annoyed she'd been found, thereby reopening the matter. A blond gringa was out hiking somewhere she had no business being in the first place and tripped and hit her head on something. Where's the crime?

Lou brought her back to New York, using a medevac plane supplied by the State Department, which, wanting no more CIA-type scandals of American nationals being murdered in Guatemala, cooperated with great dispatch.

After that, he needed a job that would afford him time flexibility, so he could be at her bedside as much as possible. David was looking for a security head, and I realized it would be a perfect match. Since we didn't really need a full-time person, Lou could spend a lot of hours at Lenox Hill, watching over Sarah.

She was just lying there now, no sign of consciousness, her body being kept alive with IV I'd go by to visit her as much as I could, and almost as bad as seeing the comatose Sarah was seeing the grief in Lou's eyes. He would sit there at the hospital every day, sometimes several hours a day, fingering an old engraved locket that carried her high-school graduation picture, just rubbing it through his fingers like a rosary. We always made allowances when he wanted to take time off during one of our shooting schedules, figuring maybe he was helping her. . . .

As I turned east, to go crosstown, I thought again about Sarah's condition. She and I looked a lot alike, dense blond hair for one thing, but to see her now you'd scarcely know it, since hers had been clipped down to nothing by the hospital. Her cheekbones, however, were still strong, a quality now exaggerated by her emaciated state, and her eyes, which I had not seen in years, were a deep languid, turquoise blue. But seeing her lying there inert, being kept alive with tubes and liquids, wearing pressure pants to help circulate blood through her legs, you'd scarcely realize she'd been a strikingly beautiful woman before the accident.

What's worse, from what I knew, the horrific brain traumas that bring on a coma don't automatically go away when you regain consciousness. If the coma is the result of a head injury, and if it lasts more than a few days, the chances of regaining all your mental functions are up for grabs. Lou once said there's a scale of eight stages to full recovery. People who have short comas can sometimes come out of them and go through those stages quickly—from initial eye movement to full mental faculties. Others, who've been under for months or longer can require years to come back. Sometimes they can only blink their eyes to answer questions; sometimes they babble on incessantly. They can talk sense, or they can talk nonsense, incoherent fantasies, even strings of numbers. The brain is a complex, unpredictable thing. . .

I always thought about this as I took the elevator up to Lenox Hill's third floor. The room where they kept Sarah was painted a pale, sterile blue, and made even more depressing by stark fluorescent lights. Everything was chrome and baked-on enamel, including the instruments whose CRT screens reported her bodily functions. None of the instruments, however, had ever shown the brain activity associated with consciousness.

Lou was there when I walked in. He had a kind of wildness in his eyes, maybe what you get when you mix hope with despair. We hugged each other and he said, "She had a moment, Morgy. She knew me. I'm sure she did."

Then he told me in detail what had happened. A nurse passing Sarah's room had happened to notice an unexpected flickering on one of her monitors. She'd immediately informed the nurses' station, where instructions included Lou's home number.

He'd grabbed a cab and raced there. When he got to her room, he pushed his way past the Caribbean nurses and bent over her, the first time he had hoped a conversation with her would be anything but a monologue.

"Honey, can you hear me?"

There was no sign, save the faint flicker of an eyelid.

It was enough. His own pulse rocketed.

"Where's the damned doctor?"

While the physician was being summoned, he had a chance to study her. Yes, there definitely was some movement behind her eyelids. And her regular breathing had become less measured, as though she were fighting to overcome her autonomic nervous system and challenge life on her own.

Finally an overworked Pakistani intern arrived. He proceeded to fiddle with the monitors, doing something Lou did not understand. Then without warning—and certainly attributable to nothing the physician did—Sarah opened her eyes.

Lou, who had not seen those eyes for several years, caught himself feasting on their rich, aquatic blue. He looked into them, but they did not look back. They were focused on infinity, adrift in a lost sea of their own making. They stared at him a moment, then vanished again behind her eyelids.

He told me all this and then his voice trailed off, his despair returning. . . .

"Lou, it's a start. Whatever happens is bound to be slow. But this could be the beginning. . . ."

We both knew what I was saying was perilously close to wishful thinking, but nobody in the room was under oath. For the moment, though, she was back in her coma, as though nothing had changed.

I waited around until eight o'clock, when I finally convinced myself that being there was not doing anybody any good. Lou, I later learned, stayed on till well past eleven, when they finally had to send security to evict him.

Okay, I've been holding out on the most important detail. The truth is, I hardly knew what to make of it. At one point when I was bending over Sarah's seemingly unconscious face, her eyes had clicked open for just a fleeting moment, startling me the way those horror movies do when the "un-dead" suddenly come alive. Lou was in his chair and didn't see it, didn't notice me jump.

The last thing I wanted to do was tell him about it, and I was still shivering as I shoved my key into the Toyota's ignition and headed for home. She'd looked directly into my eyes, a flicker of recognition, and then came the fear. She sort of moved her mouth, trying to speak, but all that came was a silent scream, after which her eyes went blank as death and closed again.

She knew me, I was sure of it, but she had looked through me and seen a reminder of some horror now locked deep in her soul.

[Chapter Four]

Lou took the next few days off to spend by Sarah's side, but nothing more happened. I repeatedly called him at the hospital to check on her, though it was becoming clear her brush with consciousness had only been an interlude. Finally, I decided to show Carly's rushes to David (he loved them) and try to concentrate on postproduction for the rest of the week and the weekend, anything to make me not have to dwell on Sarah's ghostlike, soundless cry of anguish.

Postproduction. When you're shooting a picture, you have to make all kinds of compromises; but in post, with luck and skill, you can transform that raw footage into art. You mix and cut the takes till the performances are taut; you loop in rerecorded dialogue where necessary to get just the right reading of a line; the Foley guys give you clear sound effects where the production sound is muddy; and you balance the hues of reds and blues, darks and lights till you get just the right color tone.

All of the polishing that came with post still lay ahead. The first step was to go through the rough cut and "spot" the film, marking places where the sound effects or dialogue would need to be replaced with rerecorded studio sound— which meant several days, maybe weeks, of looping to edit out background noise and make the dialogue sound rich and crisp. For some of it, the actors would have to come back in and lip-synch themselves, which they always hate.

It was daunting, to have to work back and forth between production sound tracks and loop tracks, blending alternate takes. You had to figure on only doing about ten minutes of film a day, and then, after all that, you had to get the "opticals" right, the fade-outs and dissolves and, finally, the credit sequences.

Normally, once I started post, I would have exactly ten weeks to accomplish all that before the executive producer, David, got his hands on my picture. That was the prerogative that was part of the standard director's contract. Now, though, I figured that was out the window. With the money going fast, I had to produce a rough cut and get the picture sold to cable in six weeks, period.

But first things first. I deeply needed at least one more interview—Carly's was too much of a happy one-note— which was why I needed to shoot Paula Marks. It was now on for Thursday, today.

The appointment had taken all weekend, including a Sunday brunch, to set up, but by that time I was sure this second mother would be perfect. She was a tall, willowy woman, forty-three, who had let her hair start going to gray. Honesty, it was right there in her pale brown eyes. She wrote children's books, had never married—she now believed she never would—and had decided to adopt a child because she had a lot of extra love she felt was going to waste. Different from Carly Grove, maybe, but not in the matter of strength, and fearless independence.

We arrived around ten A.M. to discover her apartment was in one of those sprawling prewar West Side monoliths, thick plaster walls and a rabbit's warren of halls and foyers, legacy of an age before "lofts" and open spaces. Terribly cramped for shooting. But Paula agreed to let the blue-jeaned crew move her old, overstuffed couch out of the living room, along with the piles of books that lined the walls.

Another issue was makeup. At first Paula insisted she didn't want any. Never wore it, it was deceitful, and she didn't want to appear on camera looking like Barbie. (Small chance of that, I thought. A little war paint now and then might help your chances of landing a father for this child.) Eventually Arlene persuaded her that cameras lie and the only way to look like yourself is to enhance those qualities that make you you. It was a thin argument, but Arlene came from a long line of apparel proprietors who could unload sunlamps in the Sahara.

Paula's adopted daughter Rachel, who was a year and a half old, was running around the apartment, blond tresses flowing, dragging a doll she had named Angie. Except the name came out "Ann-gee." She was immediately adopted by the crew, and Erica, the production manager, was soon teaching her how to play patty-cake. Then Rachel wanted to demonstrate her new skills at eating spaghetti. In five minutes she was covered head to toe in Ragu tomato sauce.

When the Panaflex was finally rolling, the story Paula spun out was almost identical to the one told by Carly Grove. She'd spent hours with all the legal services recommended by NYSAC, New York Singles Adopting Children, listening to them describe a scenario of delays and paperwork and heartache. It could be done, but it could take years. Look, she'd declared, I'll cash in my IRA, do anything, just give me some hope. Okay, they'd replied, tighten your belt, scare up sixty big ones, and go to see Children of Light. We hear stories. . . .

Soon after she called them, the skies had opened. A New Age physician and teacher there, a man with striking eyes named Alex Goddard, had made it happen. Rachel was hers in just four months, no paperwork.

Sure, she declared, Children of Light was expensive, but Alex Goddard was a deeply spiritual man who really took the time to get to know you, even practically begged you to come to his clinic-commune and go through his course of mind-body fertility treatment. But when she insisted she just wanted to adopt, he obligingly found Rachel for her. How could she be anything but grateful? She was so happy, she wanted everybody in the world to know about him.

As she bubbled on, I found my attention wandering to Rachel, who'd just escaped from the crew keeping her in the kitchen and was running through the living room, singing a song from Sesame Street. Something about the way she moved was very evocative.

Where've I seen her before? Then it dawned on me. Her walk made me think of Kevin. Actually, everything about her reminded me of Kevin. Were all kids starting to look the same? God, I wanted them both.

Yeah, I thought, daydreaming of holding her, she's Kevin all over again, clear as day. She's a dead ringer to be his older sister. It feels very strange.

Or maybe I was just seeing things. To some extent all babies looked alike, right? That is, until you have one of your own.

I had to swallow hard, to try to collect my thoughts. Carly and Paula scarcely even knew each other. If Rachel really was Kevin's sister, they'd never know anything about it.

Incredible . . . it was just too big a coincidence.

But still. . . and what about the film footage? Show close- ups of the kids, and anybody not legally blind was going to see the similarity. . . .

Why would somebody give up two children for adoption? I found myself wondering. Giving up one was tragic enough.

"Cut." I waved at everybody. "Take ten. We need to recharge here, take a break and stretch."

Paula was caught off guard, in the middle of a sentence, and she let her voice trail off, puzzled.

"Hey, I'm sorry Rachel came barging in," Paula finally said. "Guess she broke everybody's concentration, huh?"

"Yeah, well, sometimes we all need to lean back and take a fresh run at things." I called to Rachel, who came trotting over, spaghetti sauce still on her face, and picked her up. I felt at a loss about what to do. Tell Paula her daughter had a younger brother in the Village, and she might fall apart. "I was actually curious about something. Do you know anything about Rachel's birth mother?"

"I don't want to know. It would disrupt my life. And my peace of mind." Her eyes acquired a kind of sadness mingled with anxiety. "I'm reconciled to the fact she probably got into some kind of trouble, may not have exactly been Nobel Prize material, but I'm a big believer in nurture over nature. That's why I write books for kids. So I think Rachel's going to end up being a lot more like me than like her real mother."

Brave words. But I'll bet you anything the story of Rachel's mother is a lot more complicated than you imagine.

I glanced at my watch, the hour pushing four-thirty. Time to call it a wrap. Besides, if we shot any more today, the crew would end up on overtime, and David was getting increasingly nervous about my extra costs.

I also needed a little downtime to reflect.

"Look, I think I've got enough footage to work with for now. Let me just get the release signed take this film downtown, and get it processed. Maybe we can come back for another shoot when I figure out exactly where this is going."

"Anytime. Just give me some notice and I'll try to have the place cleaned up more next time."

"Don't worry. I like it to look real. Just sign the release and I'll take it from there." I was about to set Rachel back on the floor when something caught in my sweater. Looking down, I realized it was a tiny charm bracelet, with two little medallions on it. One was a little red plastic likeness of Pocahontas, the Disney character, and the other was a silver face of a cat, long and stylized. And on the back, those curious lines and dots again, only these were arranged differently from those on the one Carly's boy Kevin had.

"Paula, what's this? This cat. Where'd you get it?"

"Oh, that." She smiled. "She was wearing it when I got her, on a little silk cord around her waist, under her diaper. They told me it was a gift from her real mother, a keepsake. Sort of breaks your heart, but the way they said it, you want to keep it forever. . . ."

At that moment Erica was just plugging the phone back in, and the second she did, the old, black Panasonic cordless began to ring.

"Hang on a sec," Paula said. "Let me get that. My agent is supposed—" She'd picked up the phone and was plopping back onto the couch. "Hi."

Then her look turned blank. "No, of course not." She fell into an uncomfortable pause, looking around at everybody. Then she continued. "Nobody's contacted me." She halted again, her face white, and stared directly at me. I abruptly sensed that I was the topic of the conversation. "Sure I'm sure. . . . Yes, I remember signing. . . . Don't worry. I'd have no reason to. . . . Okay, sure, I'll let you know."

She clicked off the phone and looked up with startled eyes. "It was somebody who said they worked for Children of Light. She wanted to know if you'd contacted me." Her face collapsed. "You. She asked me specifically about you. By name. How did—?"

"I have no idea." My hands were growing cold. Had Carly told them about me? Why would she do that? "Anyway, you handled it okay."

Which made me wonder. If Children of Light was such a perfect organization, why was Paula so frightened she immediately felt compelled to lie, to swear she hadn't broken their rules?

"Right." Her composure was slowly coming back. "Look, now that I think about it, why should they care? It doesn't make any sense. They got their money." She turned to me. "Let me have that release."

She seized the paper and endorsed it with a flourish.

My pulse was still in overdrive, but I hugged her, then signaled the crew that shooting was over for the day.

"Okay, everybody. Time to wrap."

The gang immediately began striking the lights and rolling up electrical cords. They would take the equipment back downtown and deliver the film to the lab, while I would head home. It had been a long day and lots of thinking was needed. Besides, it was starting to rain, a dismal spatter against Paula's grimy windows, as the gray spring afternoon had begun darkening toward sullen evening.

"Listen, I enjoyed this." Paula had taken Rachel in her arms and was stroking her blond hair. "I really love talking about her. She's changed my life."

I gave her another hug. "You're great. And you're going to be wonderful in the film." If I used her. The whole thing was getting unnerving. "You have no idea how much you've helped." Then I said good-bye to Rachel, who responded with a perfect "Bye, bye" through her haze of spaghetti sauce.

Okay, get the superintendent. Crank up the freight elevator. Get out of here.

Scott Ventri, key grip, took charge of handling the gear, dictating which equipment got loaded on first. I watched long enough to make sure everything was going okay, and then I joined Arlene, old friend and queen of outrageous makeup, on the other elevator.

"You notice it?" she whispered. The door had just closed.

"Notice what?" I knew full well what she was talking about. But it just felt too bizarre.

"Those kids could almost be twins. That little boy last week, and this girl. They look just alike. It's spooky."

"Guess their parents couldn't figure out what was causing those pregnancies. So they just kept having more babies." I decided to try to insert some humor, deflect the conversation. "Maybe we should tell Paula and Carly."

"Very dumb." Arlene bit at a long, red, false fingernail, a perennial habit for as long as I'd known her. "We should mind our own business, that's what we should do."

"Works for me. But it also proves we were smart not to shoot any footage of the kids. The whole world would realize something's funny." Then I had an idea. "Want to come downtown to my place after we unload? Have some deep thoughts over what all this means?"

First the kids, then the call. What was this guy Alex Goddard, whoever he was, up to? Definitely time to talk to somebody. . . .

"Gee, I'd love to," Arlene was saying, "but I can't. I gotta go out to Kew Gardens for my mom and dad's anniversary tonight. Their thirty-fifth, can you believe? Of course, I was a very late baby." She blinked her dark, languid eyes, as though rehearsing the line for a downtown club.

"A miracle of modern fertility science, right?" Shit. Arlene, I need you.

"Right." She giggled, then seemed to study the flashing lights on the elevator's control panel. "God, those kids, they're too good to be true. I'd love to have one like that." She impatiently pounded the number one a couple of times, perhaps hoping to speed our creaky descent. "I can get bonked every night of the week, but I can't get a serious boyfriend. New York's clubs aren't exactly brimming with the vine-covered-cottage-and-picket-fence type. And as for the pickings at work, given the kind of pictures David makes, forget it. Last thing I need is some twenty-year-old pothead who thinks with his wang."

"I'm afraid I'm not helping you much with this one." I'd cast Baby Love mostly with Off-Broadway unknowns. The actress Mary Gregg was a veteran of Joseph Papp's original Public Theater, the experimental enterprise downtown. The few male parts all went to guys who were either gay or married.

"Oy, what can you do, right? If it happens, it happens." Arlene watched the door begin to stutter open as we bumped onto the lobby level. Then she zeroed in on me. "You really want a kid too, don't you? I mean, that's why you did this script, right? Which, by the way, is great. I mean the script."

"I think most women do, down deep."

She smiled. "Well, if I ever have one, it's going to be the old-fashioned way. It's a heck of a lot cheaper than adopting." She was heading out, into the front foyer. "Not to mention more fun getting there."

On that I definitely had to agree.

The lobby's prewar look was gray and dismal, and as we emerged onto the street, the rain had turned into a steady downpour. Lou was off again today, down at the hospital with Sarah, so I'd engaged a doorman from a new co-op across the street to keep an eye on our vans. A crisp twenty had extracted his solemn promise to do just that. At the moment, however, he was nowhere to be seen. Proving, I suppose, David's theory that we needed our own security guy at all location shoots.

Lou, I thought, I hope you're finally getting through to her.

"No limo, but at least we get first call on the vans," Arlene observed, her voice not hiding the sarcasm. "Just once I'd

like to work for somebody who had serious VIP transportation."

"David would walk before he'd get a limo."

We were headed down the street, me digging out my keys, when I noticed the man standing in the rain. He was just behind our lead van, a three-year-old gray Ford, waiting for us.

My first thought was he must be connected to Nicky Russo, David's wiseguy banker, here to bust my chops over the Teamster issue. Screw him. Just my luck he'd send somebody the very day Lou was not on hand. But then I realized I'd guessed wrong. The man was more Hispanic than Italian. He also was short, solidly built, late fifties maybe, with intense eyes and gray hair that circled his balding pate like the dirty snow around a volcano's rim. As he moved toward us, I thought I detected something military in his bearing, not so much the crispness of a soldier but rather the authoritative swagger of an officer. Well, maybe a retired officer.

"The paper on your windshield says you are filming a movie," came a voice with a definite Spanish accent. No greetings, no hiya, how're you doin'? Just the blunt statement. Then, having established what was already clear to all at hand, he continued. "It says the title is Baby Love. Why are you making this movie here?"

That was it. I glanced at Arlene, who'd turned white as a sheet. You get a lot of onlookers around a location shoot, but not too many who challenge your right to exist, which was exactly what was coming through in his menacing tone.

I handed Arlene the keys. "Here, go ahead and open up. I'll handle this."

Then I turned back to him. "What you saw in the windshield of the vans is a New York City Film Board permit. That's all the information we are required to provide. If you read it, you know everything I'm obliged to tell you." I returned his stare. "However, if people ask nicely, I'm happy to answer their questions."

"Are you making this movie about a person in this building? Your other films have been documentaries."

God help me, I thought. Is this what my fans are like?

Then it hit me. I don't know how I'd missed the connection, but now it just leapt out. First the phone call, then this hood. Somebody was tracking me.

"I'm scouting locations," I lied, feeling a chill go through me. "We're second unit for an action film, shooting some prep footage for the producers. Does the name Arnold Schwarzenegger mean anything to you?"

"Then why is the film about babies?"

"That's meant to be a joke. Remember the movie Twins? It's a joke title. Do you understand?"

At that moment, Paul Nulty came barging out the door with a huge klieg light, followed by several other members of the crew carrying sound gear. Our cordial tete-a-tete was about to be disrupted.

My new Hispanic friend saw them and abruptly drew up. That was when I noticed the shoulder holster under his jacket, containing some sort of snub-nosed pistol.

Jesus, I thought, this must be what some kind of hired killer looks like. That gun's not a prop.

"I think you are lying." He closed his jacket and, ignoring my crew, bored in relentlessly on me, his eyes dead and merciless. "That is a big mistake."

It was the first time in my life I'd ever stood next to a man who had a gun and was deeply ticked at me. He'd wanted me to see his piece, just to make sure I took him seriously. He wasn't threatening me, per se. Rather he was letting me know how strongly he cared about what I was doing.

Well, damn him, but I still was scared. I might have managed to bluff Nicky Russo, but he was a guy who operated by an age-old set of Sicilian rules. This thug didn't strike me as the rule-book type.

Hand shaking, I pulled out my cell phone, flicked it open, and punched in 911.

"Listen, if you're threatening me with a gun, I'm calling the cops. Whatever problem you have with the New York film industry, you can explain it to them."

New York's police emergency number was still ringing as he abruptly turned and strode away.

I clicked the phone shut and moved to get out of the way as a trolley loaded with more gear was rolled past me down the sidewalk. Unfortunately, I also took my eyes off him for a second, and when I looked up again, he seemed to have disappeared into the rain, though I did notice somebody who could have been him get into a long black car well down the block and speed off toward Broadway.

"What did that creep want?" Arlene asked, coming back with the keys.

I was only slowly returning to reality, and it took me a few moments to form a coherent answer through all the adrenaline surging into my brain.

"I . . . I don't know. But I think I'd better warn everybody to keep an eye out for strangers. He's . . . he's wound a little tight, to put it mildly." I was still shaking, which she fortunately failed to notice. At that point, there seemed no great reason to spook her with mention of the gun.

"Boy, he wasn't just some homeless junkie," she said. "He looked like a heavy in one of David's old action pictures. All he needed was a Mack-10."

"Right." Jesus, Arlene, I think he might have had one. "So let's get moving."

As I watched the vans being loaded, slowly calming down, I kept thinking about him. He was undoubtedly connected to the phone call, but why would anybody be so worried about what I was doing? I couldn't think of any serious reason.

Half an hour later we were all headed downtown. Along the rain-swept streets the "All Beef" hot-dog vendors cowered under their red-and-yellow striped umbrellas, while departing office workers, briefcases perched above their heads as makeshift protection, scurried along the edges of buildings searching for cabs. While Arlene continued to chat nonstop, I tried to do a little mental processing. And my mind kept drifting back to the sight of little Rachel, and Kevin. What perfect kids. The way she was running. . . .

Hey, wait a minute. How could they be siblings? Brother and sister? Rachel was almost exactly half a year older than Kevin. Biology didn't work that way. No way could they be related, but still . . . they looked so alike.

I realized Arlene hadn't put it together about the ages. The brother/sister theory made absolutely no sense. Those kids were born six months apart.

If that wasn't strange enough, why did they both have those tiny cat medallions with the lines and dots on the back? Which were actually kind of creepy, more like sacred amulets than little toys.

Talk to Lou. He might have some insights.

No, better yet, go to the source. Children of Light. Call Alex Goddard's adoption agency or clinic or whatever it is and make an appointment.

[Chapter Five]

I was feeling a bit off center that evening, but I explained it away as mental overload, the rain, and the implied threats. That diagnosis got revised the next morning when I awoke with a mind-numbing headache, chills alternating with a mild fever, and my chest feeling like it was caught in a compactor. It was a so-called common cold, but there was nothing common about my misery, which was truly exceptional.

I made a cup of Echinacea tea and then washed down 2000 mg of Vitamin C with some aging orange juice from my fridge, after which I took a couple of Tylenol, put on yesterday's jeans, and headed uptown to work. I also treated myself to a cab.

When I settled into the cluttered corner room that was my office, I told myself this was not a day to make any big decisions. Just stick to matters that required nothing more than autopilot.

The first thing I did was call Lou to check on Sarah (no change), and then I told him about my Hispanic visitor. He made concerned sounds and promised to accompany me on any further location shoots.

Next I pulled out my date book and punched in a phone number I'd scribbled in the back. I'd gotten it when I was winding up my interview with Carly Grove.

"Children of Light," said an unctuous voice. "This is Ramala."

I hesitated a moment before giving my name. They already knew who I was; Ramala or somebody had called Paula Marks and asked about me. Me. What would she do when she heard it was yours truly in the flesh?

I tried to take a deep breath, working around the feeling my lungs were on fire, and identified myself.

Ramala received the information as though she'd never heard of me. Maybe she hadn't. Then I asked for an appointment with Alex Goddard. As soon as it was convenient.

"He leaves his Saturdays open," she said, more of the smiley voice, "so I could make a special appointment for you tomorrow. Would ten A.M. be all right?"

Her accent was the kind of Delhi colonial-ruling-class you associate with expensive silk saris and ruby bracelets, yet at the same time her voice had an overlay of that melodious, touchy-feely unctuousness you hear on relaxation tapes. I half expected her to next say, inhale deeply and feel the love flowing through the universe. In any case, she couldn't have sounded more open and forthcoming.

I had to remind myself immediately that it wasn't true. Given the inquisitive phone call to Paula Marks, Children of Light was an organization that deeply cherished its privacy. Presumably they had a reason, and that reason didn't necessarily have to be sinister, but still, I had every reason to think they were upset about me and it made me paranoid. And now Alex Goddard immediately had time for a "special appointment."

"Ten o'clock will be fine," I said, just barely croaking the words out of my chest.

She gave me directions for reaching the Riverdale clinic, called Quetzal Manor, and hung up. I felt so miserable I could barely remember afterward what she'd said, but fortunately I'd taken notes.

Quetzal Manor. An odd choice for a name, I'd thought.

Some kind of bird sacred to the Maya Indians of Central America. But then Paula had mentioned at one point that he was very interested in indigenous Third World herbs and remedies. So maybe it fit.

But still, one big puzzle kept coming back to haunt: How do you produce perfectly healthy siblings six months apart? (I actually called Carly and Paula back to verify the ages.) The more I thought about Kevin and Rachel, the more I realized they were so unmistakably related.

Puzzling over that, I began to wonder if maybe I was on the verge of uncovering a blockbuster documentary. Could we be talking something approaching science fiction here? Making documentaries, you're always on the lookout for the unexpected, the fresh. So how about an organization that could obtain beautiful Caucasian babies seemingly at will, including peas-in-a-pod born a few months apart? I was already framing a pitch to David in my mind.

Anyway, the rest of the day, while I was busy battling my cold with antihistamines and lots of hot soup, I mounted a major phone inquiry just to make sure all the rules on adoption hadn't somehow changed when I wasn't looking. They hadn't. First off, to get a child in three or four months, you'd almost certainly have to go with foreign adoption. China was everybody's flavor of the month, because they favored older parents and also because the one-child-per-family policy there had ended up producing a wide-scale abandonment of girls (who were all those precious boys going to marry? I often found myself wondering). However, the shifting politics there made the process very unreliable. A few months? Don't even think about it.

Pressing on, I satisfied myself that the country-specific organizations that found babies in the emerging parts of the world all still worked the same. Cradle of Hope specialized in orphaned Russian kids. Children and Families, Inc., provided adoptions for Equadorian children. International Adoption Assistance, Inc., handled Brazilian orphans. But they all were still fussy, and they could take ages. How about a brand-new healthy baby in just a few months? I'd ask. Some kind of new fast track? The question was always taken as a joke. . . .

I would be driving up to Quetzal Manor in my old Toyota, and I dearly wished Steve could somehow materialize and be with me. In his absence, however, I convinced Lou to come along. I figured the change of scene would do him good, and I also wanted the security of having him with me, after the threatening phone call to Paula and the Hispanic thug who'd accosted me outside her apartment building. Besides, it'd just be a couple of hours.

The next morning, as we trekked up Riverside Drive, then the Henry Hudson Parkway, the sky was a flawless blue and the wide Hudson seemed like an ardent highway leading into the heart of America. Still in elevated spirits over Sarah's momentary brush with consciousness, Lou had noticeably less of a hangover than was usual most mornings. Maybe he was looking forward to a little mental R&R. For my own part, I felt my curiosity growing. I'd gone to a lot of appointments over the years, but rarely did I suspect the person I was going to see already knew more about me than I knew about them.

After we crossed the Henry Hudson Bridge, we left the highway and headed down a service road that led toward the river. Then there was an imposing gate, open, and a tree- shrouded driveway. Finally the place loomed in front of us.

The physical appearance of Quetzal Manor was a study in European grandeur, translated with a few extra frills from the New World. Carly had told me it had once been a Carmelite convent, dating from sometime in the middle of the last century, and it was a monument to Church authority, with endless arches of cut stone, turrets, gargoyles. As we were motoring to the end of the long cobblestone drive, I felt as if I was approaching some Gothic movie set. Given its hovering sense of regal authority, the place could easily have been a castle, but it seemed more like a brooding homage to medieval torture. Let me just say it was truly magisterial, yet also more than a little creepy.

As we parked under a huge oak tree in front, I surveyed the facade, trying to marshal my strength. Enough of my cold still lingered that I didn't feel as if my mind was working on all cylinders, and for a moment I merely sat looking, trying to breathe.

"Want me to go in with you?" Lou asked finally. He was examining the building suspiciously, like a detective surveying a crime scene.

I wanted him with me and then again I didn't. I longed for the company, a protector, but I didn't want the complications, more things to explain inside. Finally I made a snap decision.

"Why don't you take a stroll around the grounds?" I suggested. "Commune with nature. The fresh air will do you good. This can't take long. Mainly I just want to get some literature and try to gain a feeling for the place."

That wasn't entirely, or even partly, true. What I really wanted to find out was threefold: How did they manage to get beautiful healthy Caucasian babies for two single women in just a few months; how could those babies be only six months apart in age and still obviously be siblings; and (this was where my feelings got complicated) could they get a baby for me the same way, never mind how they did it. It was the third thing that actually bothered me the most, since I was far from sure I wanted to be a part of whatever was going on.

Lou just shrugged and leaned back in his seat. "Take as

long as you like. I'll just wait here in the car. I'm not the nature type."

That was certainly the case.

I walked across the cobblestones to an arched entryway that had no door. I wondered at this—most convents are like a fortress—and then I realized the front door had been removed, leaving only its ancient hinges still bolted into the stones. Perhaps it was intended to be a symbol of openness, inviting you in.

There was no sign of anybody—the saccharine-voiced Ramala was not on hand to greet me—so I just headed on down a wide hallway, past a table of brochures. The place had been decorated with expensive good taste: tapestries all over the stone walls, perfect Persian rugs, classic church statuary—all of it calling forth powerful feelings from deep in the psyche.

Then I entered a vast interior courtyard, where a central fountain splashed cheerily in the midday light. The courtyard was circled with a picturesque gallery of cells, all with massive wooden doors, most likely rooms once inhabited by chaste sisters.

The place did seem to be a clinic-commune now, just as Paula had said. Not nuns this time around, but rather New Age acolytes whose tastes ran more to secular music than to religious chants, as witness the cacophony of sounds that wafted out from several of the cells. Only it wasn't any kind of conventional music; it seemed a mixture of Japanese flute, North Indian ragas, African drumming. I liked the ragas, even recognized my favorite, "Bhairavi."

Then I spotted something that riveted my attention. At the back of the courtyard, just past a final wooden door, stood a huge South Indian bronze statue, about five feet high, of the Dancing Shiva. It appeared to be presiding over the arch way that led out into a dense natural garden behind the building.

I walked across the cobblestones to examine and admire it. It seemed an odd item to find here in the courtyard of a once-cloistered convent. I was so enthralled I failed to hear the door behind me open.

"Do you find my Shiva interesting, Ms. James?" said a soothing voice, just barely audible above the chirps of birds. I think I caught a breath in my phlegm-locked chest, but then I turned to see a tall man dressed in casual chinos and a dark sweater. He was trim, looked to be in his early sixties, with a mane of salt-and-pepper hair and lean features more craggy than handsome. But his eyes were everything, telling you he owned the space around him, owned in fact, the air he breathed. It had to be Alex Goddard.

"Yes," I answered almost before I thought. "It just seems to be a little out of place here."

I wondered if he was going to introduce himself. Then I realized that when you're used to being the master of a private domain, you probably never think to bother with such trivial formalities. Everybody knows who you are.

"Well," he said, his voice disarmingly benign, "I suppose I must beg to differ. May I suggest you consider this Shiva for a moment and try to imagine he's a real god?"

"He is a real god" I said immediately feeling patronized. Nothing makes me angry faster. "In India, he's—"

"Yes," he said "I know you did a film about India—which I found quite extraordinary, by the way—but why wouldn't the Shiva fit right in here? You see, he's a very modern, universal figure. He incorporates everything that exists in the contemporary world. Space, time, matter, and energy. As well as all of human psychology and wisdom."

"I'm aware of that," I said sensing my pique increase. We were not getting off to a great start.

"Yes, well." He seemed not to hear me. Instead he started putting on the leather jacket he'd had slung over his shoulder. "Notice that Shiva has four arms, and he's dancing with one foot raised. He's also standing inside that great circle of flame, a sort of halo encompassing his whole body. That circle stands for the great, all-embracing material universe, all of it. Dark and light, good and evil. He knows and controls everything."

Hey, I realized, this guy's got some kind of identity thing going with this ancient Indian god.

He continued as he zipped up the jacket. "Shiva has four arms because—"

"Let me tell you," I said, interrupting him. He looked startled, clearly not accustomed to a woman meeting him on his own ground. "He has four hands because he has a lot to do. That little drum in his upper right summons things into existence. And there in his upper left he holds a fire that destroys."

Goddard was examining me curiously, but I just stared back and continued.

"His lower right hand is held up in a kind of benediction, as if to say, 'Find your peace within,' and the lower left points down at his feet, where one foot is planted on the back of that repulsive little dwarf there, the human ego. Crush the ego and be free. The other foot is lifted to signify spiritual freedom."

"You seem to know the Shiva well." He broke into a grudging smile, as though we'd just met. Chalk up round one as a draw. "I'm glad you came, Ms. James. I'm a great admirer of your work and I especially wanted to provide your orientation personally. It's a genuine pleasure to meet you at last."

At last? I took his proffered hand and stared. All the questions I'd been brooding over for the past week sort of disappeared into a memory file somewhere. Instead all I could do was focus in on him.

Meeting Carly and Paula's miracle worker in the flesh made me recall something Aldous Huxley once observed. He declared that the kind of man, and they are almost always men, who can control others with his mind needs to have certain qualities the rest of us can only envy. Of course he has to be intelligent and have a range of knowledge that can be used to impress people, but most of all, he has to have a will of iron, an unswerving tenacity of purpose, and an uncompromising self-confidence about who he is, what he wants. This means a slightly remote manner, a glittering eye, and a sympathetic gaze that bores in deeply on you one minute, then seems off in another realm, focused on infinity, the next. Perhaps most importantly of all, his voice must be that of a Pied Piper, a soft yet penetrating instrument that acts directly on the unconscious of his listeners.

Even though he was doing a casual number with me, my first impression of Alex Goddard was that he perfectly embodied all those qualities. I also sensed a false note. What was it? Maybe he was being just a little too casual.

"If you're here about doing a film," he began, "please be aware we do not encourage publicity. If you've come because of your infertility, as Ramala said you mentioned in your call, then I welcome you with open arms."

Well, he knew how to cut to the chase. And after his phone call to try to intimidate Paula Marks, I was well aware he didn't "encourage publicity." But now I also realized he wouldn't be overly interested in my new idea of someday doing a documentary on this place. But then a lot of people say no at first and then come around.

"I was actually interested in neither," I said, feeling my sinuses about to close down permanently. "I was actually hoping to find out about your adoption service, how it works."

"Ah," he said, his eyes shifting from intense scrutiny to somewhere lost in the ozone, "that's not something I handle personally. In any case, you first must come and participate in our program. Then, if we fail to achieve your objectives, we can take the adoption matter under consideration."

"I think I'd like to hear about it anyway." I took a deep breath, again groping for air. "For instance, where and how you get the children you place."

"I see," he said calmly, as though my question were about the weather. Then he secured his coat tighter. "I'm thinking, how would you like to take a short walk? Down to the river. We could get to know each other better."

I just nodded, not looking forward to the harsh wind that would assault my inflamed sinuses. But maybe I was getting somewhere.

As we started out through the stone archway and into the rear garden, which seemed to extend for acres, he continued.

"You seem to have a lot of questions about what I'm doing here. So let me try and put my efforts into perspective. As I like to point out to women when they first come here, we in the West are making do with only half the world's medical knowledge. We ignore all of the East. There's also the wisdom of the indigenous peoples here in the Western Hemisphere, the Native Americans. Who are we to say they don't have a lot to teach?" He smiled, as though embarrassed to be passing along such a commonplace. "For example, Western medical practice, virtually until this century, consisted mainly of using leeches to drain away 'humors' in the blood. At the same time, the indigenous peoples of this continent knew more about the curative powers of plants, even drugs, than Europe ever dreamed of. Yet they were deemed savages."

I wasn't sure where he was leading, but the supreme self- confidence with which he spoke had the effect of sweeping me along. The engaging eyes, the voice, the well-used designer jacket, it all worked. He was good, very good.

"So you see," he went on, "what I've tried to achieve here at Quetzal Manor is to integrate the knowledge of East and West, ancient and modern."

"So what, exactly, do you—?"

"Well, first let me explain that I studied in the Far East for over a decade, until I understood how to control the energy flows in the body, your Chi. Then I moved to Central America, where I learned all that is currently known about Native American practices and medicines. I still have a special place there, where I carry out pharmacological research on the rare plants of that area, studying their effects on human fertility, on the origins of life. I have no time to waste on disease and degeneration."

We were well into his Eden-like rear garden now, which had lots of herbs and was also part orchard. There were apple trees and other fruit trees I couldn't readily identify, all just starting to show their first buds. When we came to the end, there was a cobblestone path leading west. In what seemed only a few moments, we'd reached a line of bluffs overlooking the Hudson. The early spring wind was cutting into my face, causing my nostrils to feel on fire.

As we stood gazing down at the rippling waters of the Hudson below, where a lone sailboat was caught in the breeze, the moment took on a timelessness, feeling as though it could have been any place, any century.

"Incidentally," he went on, turning slightly to me, "are you familiar with the name Asklepios?"

I had to shake my head no. It sounded vaguely familiar, but …

"He was the ancient Greek god of medicine. The physicians who revered him held that sickness could be cured using drugs and potions that came from outside the body, since they believed that's where disease originated. Now, of course, billion-dollar industries thrive by enhancing our arsenal of antibiotics."

I listened to this, wondering where he was headed. Then he told me.

"There was, however, another school of healing at that time, those who honored the daughter of Asklepios. She was Hygeia, their goddess of health. The Hygeians believed that wellness originated from properly governing your own body. For them, the greatest service of the physician was to learn how we can work with our bodies. Their ideal was healing from within rather than intervention from without."

Again he was studying me, as though trying to determine whether I was going along with what he was saying.

"Unfortunately," he continued, "the Hygeian school more or less died out in the West. However, it lives on in other places. For example, primitive peoples have no manufactured, synthetic drugs, so they use natural herbs to enhance their own immune system and stay healthy."

He turned to study the river, dropping into silence.

"Maybe I'm missing something," I declared finally. His hypnotic voice had drawn me in, in spite of myself. "How does this relate to infertility?"

He turned back and caught me with his shining eyes. They seemed to be giving off heat of their own. "Just as the body is intended to heal itself, so is a woman's womb meant to create life. If she's childless, the reason more often than not is that her body is out of harmony with itself. What I do here is seek out each woman's unique energy flows and attempt to restore them, using Eastern practices and Hygeian herbal therapies."

"Does it always succeed?" I abruptly wondered if his techniques might work for me. Face it, Western medicine had completely struck out. The problem was, the guy was just a little too smooth.

"Not always. Some women's bodies are naturally unresponsive, just as all organisms are subject to random . . . irregularities. In those cases, I try to provide her a child by other means."

"You mean adoption," I suggested.

"By whatever means seems appropriate," he replied cryptically

"Well, there's something I'd like to understand. Last week I met a woman who had adopted a baby boy through Children of Light. She got him in three months. Such a thing is, according to what I can find out, totally unheard of. So how did you manage that?"

He stared down at the river. "I thought I'd explained that adoptions are not what we primarily do here. They're provided only as a last resort, in the few cases where my regimen of Hygeian therapies fails."

"But in those cases, where do you find—?"

"As I've said before we talk about adoption, first we need to satisfy ourselves that no other options are possible." Then his eyes clicked into me. "If you could come back next Saturday to begin your tests and receive an orientation, I could give you an opinion about your chances of bearing a child. It will require a thorough examination, but I can usually tell with a good degree of certainty whether my program can help someone or not. It's really important, though, that you stay at least . . ." He was staring at me. "Mind if I do something that might relieve some of the symptoms of that cold?"

He reached out and touched my temples with his long, lean fingers. Then he placed his thumbs just above my eyebrows and pressed very hard. After a long moment, he slowly moved the pressure down to the bridge of my nose, then across under my eyes. Finally he put the heel of his hands just above my ears and pressed again. After a couple of seconds he stepped away and continued talking as though nothing had happened.

"After I give you a full examination, we can discuss our next step." With that he turned, ready to head back. "Now if you'll excuse me, I've got a lot of research data to organize."

I guess he assumed his juggernaut of arcane medical theory had rolled over me sufficiently that he could move on to other matters. I sensed he really wanted me to come back, but he was careful to wind down our mutual interview with a take-it-or-leave-it air. All the same, I felt intrigued as we moved back through the gardens and then into the courtyard. A baby. Maybe he could make it happen for Steve and me. In spite of myself, I felt a moment of hope.

"Thank you for coming," he said by way of farewell, just brushing my hand, then turned and disappeared through one of the ancient wooden doors along the veranda, leaving me alone.

Well, I thought, the calm voice and casual outfit are probably just part of his bedside manner, but you can't be near Alex Goddard and not feel a definite sense of carefully controlled power. But is his power being used for good?

This was the man whose staff was trying to deny me interviews with mothers who'd adopted through Children of Light. And what about the Hispanic hood with the gun? Did Alex Goddard send him? If not, his appearance at Paula's building was one hell of a coincidence. So why should I trust . . .

That was when I noticed it. My lingering cold had miraculously vanished, inflamed sinuses and all. I was breathing normally, and even my chest felt cleared.

My God, I thought, what did he do? Hypnotize me? It was as though a week's healing had passed through my body.

I had an epiphany, a moment that galvanizes your resolve. I had to do a documentary about this man, to find out what he was really up to. He'd mentioned he had a place in Central America. Was that the source of his special techniques, some kind of ancient Meso-American medical practices he'd discovered?

He claimed he didn't want any publicity, but that's always just an opening move. When somebody says that, what they really mean is they don't want any bad publicity; they just want to have final say about what you produce. There're ways to handle the problem.

I liberated a brochure from the hall table on my way out, thinking I would study it soon. Very closely. I had a nose for a good story, and this one felt right.

When I got back to the car, Lou was nowhere to be seen. He'd given me the impression he intended merely to sit there and doze while I went inside, but now he was gone.

Then he appeared emerging from the forest of trees. Actually, there was another building opposite the stone drive that I hadn't noticed at first. Hmmm, I thought, I wonder what that's all about. For some reason Alex Goddard hadn't offered me a tour; he'd taken me for a stroll in the opposite direction. . . .

"That was fast," Lou said settling into the car. "You get what you came for?"

The answer to that was both yes and no. In a sense I'd gotten considerably more than I bargained for.

"He wants me to come back," I said. "And I think I might do it. There's a lot more going on with Alex Goddard than you'd know from just looking at this place. The trick is to stay in control when you're around him."

I tossed the brochure into Lou's lap as I started the engine. He took it and immediately began looking through it.

Lou, I knew, was a man always interested in facts and figures. As we headed toward the Parkway he was pouring through the brochure with intense interest, even as I tried to give him a brief reprise of Alex Goddard's medical philosophy.

"It says here his patients come from all over the United States and Europe," he noted, finally interrupting me.

I found nothing odd in that, and went back to rambling on about Quetzal Manor. Give the place its due, it was placid and tranquil and smacked of the benign spirituality Goddard claimed to put so much stock in. Still, I found it unsettling.

However, Lou, as usual, chose to see matters his own way. He'd been studying the fine print at the back of the brochure, mumbling to himself, and then he emitted a grunt of discovery.

"Ah, here's what I was looking for," he declared. "You know, as a registered New York State adoption agency, this outfit has got to divulge the number of babies they placed during their last yearly reporting period."

"According to him, he only resorts to adoption if he can't cure your infertility with his special mind-body regimen," I reminded him. "Your energy flows—"

"No shit," Lou observed, then went on. "Well, then I guess his mind-body, energy flows, whatever, bullshit must fail a lot. Because last year the number was just under two hundred. So at sixty thou a pop, like it says here, we're talking about twelve million smackeroos gross in a year. Not a bad way to fail, huh?"

I caught myself emitting a soft whistle as he read out the number. There was definitely a lot more going on with Alex Goddard than met the eye.

"So what's he do with all that dough?" Lou mused. "Better question still, where in the hell did he find two hundred fresh, orphaned babies, all listed here as Caucasian? And get this: The ages reported at final processing are all just a couple of months, give or take."

Good questions, I thought. Maybe that's the reason he doesn't want publicity; it sounds a little too commercial for a mind-body guru.

My other thought was, with so many babies somehow available, why was Alex Goddard so reluctant to even discuss adoption with me?

The answer, I was sure, lay in the fact he already knew more about me than I knew about him. He knew I was making a film about adoption (how did he come by that knowledge? I kept wondering) and he was concerned he might be mentioned in it. I kept asking myself, why?

On our drive back down the Henry Hudson Parkway, I decided I was definitely looking at a documentary in the making. I just had to decide whether to do it with or without his cooperation.

[Chapter Six]

After I dropped off Lou at his space in Soho, where he was house sitting for an estate now in the courts, I decided to head on home. The more I thought about Alex Goddard, the more I felt frustrated and even a little angry that I'd completely failed to find out any of the things I'd wanted to learn about him. I replayed our interview in my mind, got nowhere, and then decided to push away thoughts of Quetzal Manor for a while and dwell on something else: Sarah, my film, anything.

It was Saturday, and unfortunately I had no plans for the evening. Translation: no Steve. Back to where I started. How many million stories in the naked city, and I was just so many million plus one. It's not a jungle out there, it's a desert.

The truth was, after Steve took off, I hadn't really been trying all that hard to pick myself up off the canvas and look around. Besides, I didn't want some other guy, I wanted him. Added to that, I somehow felt that when you're on the short countdown for forty, you shouldn't have to be going out on blind dates, wondering whether that buttoned-down MBA sitting across from you in some trendy Italian restaurant thinks you're a blimp (even though you skipped lunch), telling yourself he's presentable, doesn't seem like a serial killer, has a job, only mentioned his mother once, and could qualify as an acceptable life's mate. There's no spark, but he's probably quite nice. You wanly remember that old Barney's ad jingle, "Select, don't settle," but at this stage of life you're ready to admit you've flunked out in Love 101 and should just go with Like.

Which was one of the reasons I missed Steve so deeply. He was a lover, but he was also a best friend. And I was running low on those.

Every woman needs a best pal. After my former best, Betsy, married Joel Aimes, Off-Broadway's latest contribution to Dreamworks, and moved to the Coast with him, I was noticing a lot of empty evenings. In the old days, we could talk for hours. It was funny, since we were actually very different. Betsy, who had forgotten more about clothes and makeup than most women would ever know, hung around the garment-center showrooms and always came away with samples of next season's couture, usually for a song. I envied her that, since I usually just pretended not to care and pulled on another pair of jeans every morning. But she shared my love of Asian music.

Anyway, now she was gone and I could tell we weren't working hard enough at staying in touch. She and Joel had just moved to a new apartment and I didn't even have her latest phone number. . . .

Which brought me back to Steve. I'd often wondered why we were so alike, and I'd finally decided it was because we both started from the same place spiritually. In his case, that place was a crummy childhood in New Haven—which he didn't want to talk about much because, I gathered, it was as lonely and deprived as my own, or at least as depressing. His father had owned a small candy store and had wanted all his four children to become "professionals." The oldest had become a lawyer, the next a teacher. When Steve's turn came, he was told he should become a doctor, or at the very least, a dentist.

Didn't happen. He'd managed four years of premed at

Yale, but then he rebelled, cashed in his med-school scholarship, and went to Paris to study photography. The result was he'd done what he wanted, been reasonably successful at it, and his father had never forgiven him. I think he was still striving for the old man's approval, even after all the years, but I doubted he'd ever get it. Steve was a guy still coming to grips with things that couldn't be changed, but in the meantime he lived in worlds that were as different from his own past as he could find. He deliberately avoided middle-class comforts, and was never happier than when he was in some miserable speck on the map where you couldn't drink the water. Whatever else it was, it wasn't New Haven. . . .

Thinking about him at that moment, I had an almost irresistible desire to reach for my cell phone and call him. God, I missed him. Did he miss me the same way? I wanted so much to hear him say it.

I had a contact number for him in Belize City, an old, Brit-like hotel called the Bellevue, where they still served high tea, but I always seemed to call when he was out somewhere in the rain forest, shooting.

Do it. Don't be a wuss.

But then I got cold feet. Did I want him to think I was chasing after him? I didn't want to sound needy . . . though that was exactly what I felt like at the moment.

Finally I decided to just invent a phone conversation, recreating one from times past, one where we both felt secure enough to be flip. It was something I did more than I'd like to admit. Usually there'd be eight rings at his Park Slope loft and then a harried voice. Yes. Steve, talk to me. . . .

"Yo. This is not a recording. I am just in a transcendent plane. And if that's you, Murray, I'll have the contact sheets there by six. Patience is a virtue."

"Honey, it's me. Get out of the darkroom. Get a life."

"Oh, hi, baby." Finally tuning in. "I'm working. In a quest for unrelenting pictorial truth. But mainly I'm thinking of you."

"You're printing, right? Darling, it's lunch hour. Don't you feel guilty, working all the time?"

The truth was, it was one of the reasons I respected him so much. He even did his own contacts. His fervor matched my drive. It's what made us perfect mates.

"I've got tons of guilt. But I'm trying to get past it. Become a full human person. Go back to the dawn of man. Paint my face and dance in a thunderstorm." He'd pause, as though starting to get oriented. "Hey, look at the time. Christ. I've got a print shoot on Thirty-eighth Street at three."

He was chasing a bit of fashion work to supplement his on-again, off-again magazine assignments.

"Love," I said in my reverie, "can you come over tonight? I promise to make it worth your while. It involves a bubble bath, champagne, roses everywhere, sensuous ragas on the CD. And maybe some crispy oysters or something, sent in later on, just to keep us going."

Then I'd listen to the tone of his voice, knowing he'd say yes but putting more stock in how he said it. Still, he always gave his lines a good read.

"Then why don't we aim for about nine?" I'd go on, blissful. "That ought to give me a chance to get organized. And don't bring anything except your luscious self." The fantasy was coming together in my mind. Thinking back, I realized how much I missed him, all over again. . . .

That was when the phone on the armrest beside me rang for real. For a moment I was so startled I almost hit the brakes. Then I clicked it on, my mind still buzzing about Steve, and also, in spite of my resolve, about the curious runaround I'd just gotten from Alex Goddard.

"Listen, there was a message on my machine when I came

in. I've got to go up to the hospital. Right now." Lou's voice was brimming with hope and exuberance. "They said Sarah was stirring. She's opened her eyes and started talking. They said she's not making much sense, but . . . oh, God."

"That's wonderful." I felt my heart expanding with life. For some reason, I had a flash of memory of her climbing up into the rickety little tree house—well, more like a platform—I'd helped her build in my thirteenth summer, no boys invited to assist. A year later that part had seemed terminally dumb. "I'll meet you there."

I was almost home, but I screeched the car around and headed east. Racing over, though, I tried not to wish for too much. I kept remembering all the stages to a complete recovery and telling myself that whatever had happened, it was only the first step on a very long, very scary journey. . . .

I hadn't realized how scary till I walked into the room. Lou, who had gotten there just minutes before I did, was sitting by her side, holding her hand, his gaze transfixed on her. She was propped up slightly in her bed, two pillows fluffed behind her head, staring dreamily at the ceiling. Three attentive middle-aged nurses were standing around the sides of her bed, their eyes wide, as though Sarah were a ghost. I very quickly realized why. She was spinning out a fantasy that could only come from a deranged mind. Had she regained consciousness only to talk madness?

"Lou, does she recognize you?" I asked.

He just shook his head sadly, never taking his eyes off her face. She was weaving in and out of reality, pausing, stuttering, uncertain of her incoherent brain. Once, when she'd fallen off a swing and got knocked out for a brief moment, she came to talking nonsense. Now she seemed exactly the same way.

"Lights ... so bright," she mumbled, starting up again to recount what seemed to be a faraway fantasy, ". . . like now.

Why . . . why are there lights here?" Her lips were moving but her eyes were still fixed in a stare. Then, with that last, odd question, her gaze began to dart about the room, looking for someone who wasn't present. She settled on me for a moment, and I felt a chill from her plaintive vulnerability. When I tried to look back as benignly and lovingly as possible, I couldn't help noticing how drawn her cheeks were, doubtless from the constant IV feeding, and again my heart went out. "I'm scared," she went on, "but—"

"I'm here, honey," Lou declared, bending over her, his eyes pained. "Do you know who I am?"

"The jade face . . . a mask," she babbled on, still ignoring him. "All the colors. It's so . . . so beautiful."

Her hallucination didn't relate to anything I could understand. She clearly was off in another world, like when she was a kid, weaving the lights of the room now into some kind of dream. I touched Lou's shoulder and asked permission to turn off the overhead fluorescents, but he just shrugged me off, his attention focused entirely on her.

His eyes had grown puzzled, as though he wanted to believe she was returning to rationality but his common sense was telling him it wasn't true.

I was having a different reaction. What she was saying was random babblings, all right, but I was beginning to think she was reliving something she had actually seen.

However, she wasn't through.

"I want to pray, but . . . the white tunnel . . . is coming." She shuddered, then almost tried to smile. "Take me . . ."

She was gone, her eyelids fluttering uncontrollably.

"Honey, talk to me," Lou pleaded. He was crying, something I'd never seen him do, something I was not even aware he was capable of. What he really was trying to say was, "Come back."

It wasn't happening. She stared blankly at the ceiling for a moment, then slowly closed her eyes, a shutter descending over her soul.

"She'll be okay," I whispered to him, almost believing it. Her brain had undergone a physical trauma, enough to cause a coma, but some kind of mental trauma must have preceded it. Was she now trying to exorcise that as part of her path to recovery?

The nurses in the room stirred, perhaps not sure what to do. The overhead lights were still dazzlingly bright, and I moved to shut them off, leaving only a night-light behind the bed. Perhaps the lights had brought her awake, but I was convinced what she'd just gone through had tired her to the point that she would not revive again that day.

Then one of the Caribbean nurses came over and placed her hand on Lou's shoulder. She had an experienced face, full of self-confidence. Something about her inspired trust.

"I wouldn't let this upset you too much," she said, a lovely lilt in her voice. "What just happened may or may not mean anything. When patients first come out of a coma, they can sometimes talk just fine, and yet not make any sense. They ramble on about things they dreamed of like they were real." Then she smiled. "But it's a good first step. She could wake up perfectly fine tomorrow. Just don't pay any attention to what she says for a while. She's dreaming now."

Lou grunted as though he believed her. I nodded in sympathy, though no one seemed to notice.

I also thought that although what Sarah had said was bizarre, it sounded like something more than a dream. Or had she gone back to her child-state where imaginary worlds were real for her?

Then in the dim glare of her bed light, Lou took a wrinkled blue booklet out of his inner pocket and stared at it. I had to stare at it a moment before I realized it was a passport.

"What—?"

"The American consulate in Merida, Mexico, sent it up to 26 Federal Plaza yesterday, because my name and office address are penciled on the inside cover as an emergency contact. The police down there said somebody, some gringo tourist fly-fishing way down on the Usumacinta River, near where the Rio Tigre comes in from Guatemala, snagged this floating in a plastic bag. He turned it in to the Mexican authorities there, and it ended up with our people." He opened the passport and stared at it. "The photo and ID page is ripped out, but it's definitely Sarah's." He handed it over. "Guy I know downtown dropped it off last night. I'm not sure if it has anything to tell us, but now, I was hoping it might help jog her memory."

I took it, the cover so waterlogged its color was almost gone. However, it must have been kept dry in the plastic bag for at least some of its trip from wherever, since much of the damage seemed recent.

Lou shook his head staring wistfully at me. "I still don't know how she got down there. She was in California. Remember that postcard? If she'd come back East, she'd have got in touch. Wouldn't she?" His eyes pleaded for my agreement.

I didn't know what to say, so I just shrugged. I wanted to be sympathetic, but I refused to lie outright. He took my ambivalence as assent as he pulled out the locket containing her picture, his talisman. He fingered it for a moment, staring into space, and then he looked down and opened it, as if seeing her high school picture, from a time when she was well, would somehow ease his mind.

"This whole thing doesn't sound like her," he went on. "Know what I think? She was being held down there against her will."

My heart went out to him, and I reached over and took the locket for a moment, feeling the strong "SRC" engraved on its heart-shaped face. "Lou, she's going to come out of it. And when she does, she'll probably explain everything. She's going to be okay any day now, I've got a hunch. A gut feeling."

I had a gut feeling, all right, but not that she was going to be fine. My real fear was she was going to wake up a fantasy-bound child again.

Then I handed the locket back. He'd seemed to turn anxious without it. He took the silver heart and just stared down at it. In the silence that settled over us, I decided to take a closer look at the passport. I supposed Lou had already gone through it, but maybe he'd missed something.

As I flipped through the waterlogged pages, I came across a smudgy imprint, caked with a thin layer of dried river clay, that was almost too dim to be noticed.

"Lou, did you see this?" I held it under the light and beckoned him over. "Can you read it?"

"Probably not without my specs." He took it and squinted helplessly. "My eyes aren't getting any better."

I took it back and rubbed at the page, cleaning it. It was hard to make out, but it looked like "Delegacion de Migracion, Aeropuerto Internacional, Guatemala, C.A."

"I think this is a Guatemalan tourist entry visa." I raised the passport up to backlight the page. "And see that faint bit there in the center? That's probably her entry date. Written in by hand."

He took it and squinted again. "I can't read the damned thing, but you're right. There's some numbers, or something, scribbled in."

I took it and rubbed the page till I could read it clearly. "It's March eleventh. And it was last year."

"Hot damn, let me see that." He seized it back and squinted for a long moment, lifting the page even closer to the light. "You're right." He held it for a second more, then turned to me. "This is finally the thing I needed. Now I'm damned well going to find out what she was doing down there."

"How do you think you can do that?" I just looked at him, my mind not quite taking in what he'd just said.

"The airlines." He almost grinned. "If they can keep track of everybody's damned frequent-flyer miles for years and years, they undoubtedly got flight manifests stored away somewhere too. So my first step is to find out where she flew from."

"But we don't know which—"

"Doesn't matter." He squinted again at the passport. "Now we know for sure she showed up at the airport in Guatemala City on that date there. I know somebody downtown, smooth black guy named John Williams, the FBI's best computer nerd, who could bend a rule for me and do a little B&E in cyberspace. He owes me a couple. So, if she was on a manifest for a scheduled flight into Guatemala City that day, he'll find it. Then we'll know where she left from, who else was on the plane." He tapped the passport confidently with his forefinger. "Maybe she was traveling with some scumbag I ought to look up and get to know better."

"Well, good luck."

In a way I was wondering if we weren't both now grasping for a miracle: me half-hoping for a baby through some New Age process of "centering," Lou trying to reclaim Sarah from her mental abyss with his gruff love. But then again, miracles have been known to happen.

[Chapter Seven]

"Quetzal Manor could have the makings of a great documentary," I was explaining to David Roth. "I just need some more information-gathering first, to get a better feeling for what Alex Goddard is up to. So going back up there will be two birds with one stone. I'll learn more about him, and he might even be able to tell me why I haven't been able to get pregnant."

He was frowning, his usual skeptical self. "How long—?"

"It's just for the weekend, or maybe a little . . . I'm not sure exactly. I guess it depends on what kinds of tests he's going to run. But the thing is, I have to do it now, while he and I are still clicking. An 'iron is hot' kind of moment. The only possible problem might be if I have to push back my schedule for looping dialogue for Baby Love and then somebody's out of town."

"You check with the sound studio to warn them about possible rescheduling?" He wanted to appear to be fuming. But since he'd invited me down to his Tribeca loft at least once every three months, now that I'd finally shown up, he also had a small gleam in his eye. What did that mean?

"Yes, but I've already spotted most of the work print, and I've made tentative dates for people to come in. In a week and a half. Everything's still on schedule."

He leaned back on his white couch, as though trying to regroup. It was Saturday morning and I'd already made the

appointment to see Alex Goddard. I was going. I probably should have run it by David first, but damnit, it was my life.

Truthfully, though, I'd been dreading telling him all week, so to try and make him as congenial as possible, I'd arranged to see him at home and relaxed. It seemed to be working, more or less.

"Okay, okay, sometimes I guess it's best to just go with your gut," he said, beginning to calm down. He'd offered to whip up some brunch when I first arrived, and now I was feeling sorry I'd turned him down. I really did like him. But, alas, only as a friend. "Before I cave in totally, though, do me a favor and tell me some more about this . . . documentary? What, exactly, makes you think it's—"

"Everything." Whereupon I laid on him the full story of Carly and Paula, the children, and my encounter with Alex Goddard. The only thing I left out was the story of the Hispanic hood since I didn't think he could handle it.

"This Quetzal Manor sounds like a funny operation," he declared solemnly when I'd finished. "I say the less you have to do with a place like that, the better. Who knows what's going on."

"But, David that's what makes it so interesting. The fact that it is a 'funny' operation. I really can see a documentary here, after Baby Love is in the can. But I'll never have a chance if I don't get to know this guy while I've got a good excuse. That's how my business works."

"So you're going to go back up there and . . . Is this like going undercover or something?"

"Well . . ." What was I going to say? I was actually half beginning to believe that Alex Goddard might be able to figure out why Steve and I couldn't conceive. It was certainly worth a few days of my life, documentary or no documentary. "Look, I really want to find out what's going on. For a lot of reasons."

He sighed and sipped at his coffee.

"Morgy, this has got to be quick. Nicky Russo called again. The thing I've learned about loan sharks, they keep your books better than you do. He knows exactly how much money we've got left and how long we can last. He's licking his chops, getting ready to eat us whole."

"What did you tell him?" The very thought of Nicky gave me a chill. If we missed so much as a week on the juice, he'd have the legal right to just seize my negative. When you're desperate, you sign those kinds of loans.

"I told him something I haven't even told you yet." He smiled a wicked grin. "I know you've been schmoozing Lifetime about a cable deal, but before we put the ink to that, I want to finish some new talks I've started with Orion, their distribution people."

I think I stopped breathing for a second or two. Was there a chance for a theatrical release for Baby Love, not just a cable deal?

"When . . . You've actually met with them? How—?"

"Late yesterday." He was still grinning. "I ran into Jerry Reiner at Morton's and pitched the picture. Actually, I heard he was in town, so I wore a tie and ambushed him at lunch. He wants to see a rough cut as soon as we've got something ready."

"David, you're an angel." I was ecstatic. It was more than I'd dared hope for.

"So stay focused, for chrissake, and finish your picture. We're this close to saving our collective asses, so don't blow it. I've gone over all the schedules pretty carefully, and I'd guess we can spare a day or two, but if you drag this out, I'm going to read you your contract, the fine print about due diligence, and then finish up the final cut myself. I mean it. Don't make me do that."

"Don't you even think about that." Never! "This is my picture."

"Just business. If it's a choice between doing what I gotta do, or having Nicky Russo chew me a new asshole and become the silent partner in Applecore, guess what it's gonna be."

"David, you know I would never let that happen." I walked over and gave him the sweetest hug I knew how, still filled with joy. "And thanks so much for trying to get us a theatrical. You don't know how much that means to me."

"Hey, don't try the charm bit on me. I'm serious. I'll cut you a weekend's slack, but then it's back to the salt mines. Either this picture's in the can inside of six weeks, or we're both going to be looking for new employment. So go the hell up there, do whatever it is you're going to do, and then get this damned picture finished. There'll be plenty of time after that to worry about our next project. With luck we might even have the money for it."

With that ultimatum still ringing in my ears, I took my leave of David Roth and headed north, up the Henry Hudson Parkway. My life was getting too roller-coaster for words. . . .

As I drove, I tried not to dwell on the practical aspects of what was coming. It was hard to imagine what tests Alex Goddard could perform that hadn't already been done by Hannah Klein. Just thinking back over that dismal sequence made me feel baby-despondent all over again.

When I first mentioned I was thinking about trying to get pregnant, she looked me over, perhaps mentally calculating my age and my prospects, and then made a light suggestion.

"Why don't I give you a prescription for Clomid. Clomiphene citrate enhances ovulation, and it might be a good idea in your case. You're still young, Morgan, but you're no longer in the first blush of youth."

I took it for six months, but nothing happened. That was the beginning of my pregnancy depression.

By that time, she'd decided I definitely had a problem, so she began what she called an "infertility workup." The main thing was to check my Fallopian tubes for blockages and look for ovulatory abnormalities. But everything turned out to be fine. Depression City.

"Well," she said, "maybe your body just thinks you've released an ovum. We need to do an ultrasound scan to make doubly sure an ovarian follicle has ruptured when it's scheduled to and dropped an egg."

It turned out, however, that all those hormonal stop-and-go signals were working just fine. In the meantime, Steve and I were doing it like bunnies and still no pregnancy.

Okay, she then declared, the problem may be with your Fallopian tubes after all. Time to test for abnormalities. "This is not going to be fun. First we have to dilate your cervix, after which we inject a dye and follow it with X-rays as it moves through the uterus and is ejected out of your Fallopian tubes. We'll know right away if there's any kind of blockage. If there is something, we can go in and fix it."

"Sort of check out my pipes," I said, trying to come to grips with the procedure. I was increasingly sinking into despondency.

She did it all, and for a while she suspected there might be some kind of anatomical problem. Which brought us to the next escalation of invasiveness.

"We've got to go in and take a close-up look at everything," she said. "It's a procedure called laparoscopy. I'll have to make a small incision near your navel and insert a tiny optical device. In your case, I want to combine it with what's called a hysteroscopy, which will allow me to see directly inside your uterus for polyps and fibroids."

But again everything looked fine. I began to wonder what had happened to everybody's mother's warning you could get pregnant just letting some pimply guy put his hand in your pants.

Prior to all this, I should add, Steve had provided samples of sperm to be tested for number and vigor. (Both were just fine.) Then, toward the end of all the indignities, he actually paid to have some kind of test performed involving a hamster egg, to see if his sperm was lively enough to penetrate it. No wonder he finally went over the edge.

Now I was reduced to Alex Goddard. I'd brought a complete set of my medical test records, as Ramala had requested on the phone. I'd also brought a deep curiosity about what exactly he could do that hadn't already been done. I further wondered how I was going to talk Steve into coming back long enough to share in the project. As I motored up the driveway to Quetzal Manor, I told myself he loved me still, wanted a baby as much as I did . . . Well, let me be safe and say almost as much. The problem was, he was so demoralized about the whole thing. And then what? What if nothing happened?

I started to park my car where I had the last time, then noticed the place actually had a parking lot. It was located off to the left side of the driveway, near the second, modern building, and was more or less hidden in amongst the trees. The lot was filled with a lot of late-model but inexpensive cars, basic working-girl transportation, and it seemed a better bet for long-term parking.

The front lobby, which had been empty the first time I was there, was now a minimalist reception area, a long metal desk rolled in from somewhere. I had the odd feeling it was there just for me. The woman behind the desk introduced herself as Ramala, the same person I'd talked to twice on the phone. She looked to be about my age, with long dark hair and quick Asian eyes, punctuated by a professional smile.

She knew my name, used it the minute she saw me, and then abruptly handed me a twenty-page "application" to complete.

"It's not just a formality," she explained, businesslike and earnest. "Dr. Goddard feels it's essential that he come to know you as a person. He'll read this carefully, believe me."

She ushered me to a chair that had a retractable table for writing, then gave me a ballpoint pen.

The document turned out to be the most prying, nosy thing I'd ever filled out. The pages demanded what amounted to a mini life history. One of the things that struck me as most strange was the part asking for a ten-year employment and residential history. If you've moved around as much as I have, worked freelance a lot, you'll understand how difficult it can be to reconstruct all those dates and places, but I did my best.

There were, of course, plenty of health questions too. One page even asked whether there was anything out of the ordinary about my own birth: Was the delivery difficult, a cesarean, a breach baby? It was, as noted, a life history.

"Why does he need all this information?" I asked finally, feeling the onset of carpal tunnel syndrome in my right wrist. "I brought all my medical records."

Ramala gave me a kindly smile, full of sympathy.

"He must know you as a person. Then everything is possible. When I came here, I had given up on ever having a child, but I surrendered myself to him and now my husband and I have twin boys, three years old. That's why I stayed to help him. His program can work miracles, but you must give him your trust."

Well, I thought, I might as well go with the flow and see where it leads.

When I'd finished the form, she took it back, along with the pen, then ushered me into the wide central courtyard where I'd met Alex Goddard the first time. He was nowhere to be seen, but in the bright late-morning sunshine there was a line of about twenty women, from late twenties to early forties, all dressed in white pajama-like outfits of the kind you see in judo classes, doing coordinated, slow-motion Tai Chi-like exercises. They were intent, their eyes fixed on the fringes of infinity.

These must be some of his acolytes, I thought, the ones I heard in their nuns' cells the first time I was here. What on earth does all this orientalism have to do with fertility? I then found myself wondering. I've studied the Far East enough to do "penetrating" documentaries about it, and I still can't get pregnant.

I took one look at them—none of them looked at me—and my heart went out. They were so sincere, so sure of what they were doing. For somebody who's always questioning everything, like me, it was touching, and maybe a little daunting too.

Without a word, Ramala led me past them and on to an entryway at the far end of the courtyard, past the giant Dancing Shiva. The door was huge and ornate, decorated with beaten-copper filigree—much like one I'd seen in a Mogul palace in Northern India. Definitely awe-inspiring.

She pushed open the door without ceremony and there he was, dressed in white and looking for all the world like the miracle worker he claimed to be. He seemed to be meditating in his chair, but the moment I entered, his deep eyes snapped open.

"Did you bring your records?" he asked, not getting up. While I was producing them from my briefcase, Ramala discreetly disappeared.

"Please have a seat." He gestured me toward a wide chair.

The room was a sterile baby blue, nothing to see. No diplomas, no photos, nothing.

Except for another, smaller bronze statue of the Dancing Shiva, poised on a silver-inlaid table. I also noticed that his own flowing hair seemed to match that of the bronze figure.

Yes, I thought, I was right. That's who he thinks he is. And he has complete power over the people around him. How many chances do you get to do a documentary about somebody like this? I should have brought a Betacam for some video.

He studied my test records as a jeweler might examine a diamond, his serious eyes boring in as he flipped through the pages. The rest of his face, however, betrayed no particular interest. I finally felt compelled to break the awkward silence.

"As you can see, I've had every test known to science. And none of them found anything wrong."

He just nodded, saying nothing, and kept on reading.

After a long, awkward silence, I decided to try and open things up a bit.

"Tell me, do you have any children of your own?"

The question seemed to be one he didn't get asked too often, because he stopped cold.

"All those who come here are my children," he replied, putting aside my records, dismissively finished with them.

"Well"—I pointed to them—"what do you think?"

"I haven't examined you yet," he said, looking up and smiling, indeed beaming with confidence. "Nothing in those records tells me anything about what may be your problem. I look for different things than do most physicians."

He fiddled with something beneath his desk, and the room was abruptly filled with the sound of a hypnotic drone. Perhaps its frequency matched one in my brain, because I instantly felt relaxed and full of hope. Much better than Muzak. Then he rose and came over.

Is he going to do my exam right here? I wondered. Where's all the ob/gyn paraphernalia? The humiliating stirrups?

Standing in front of me, he gently placed his hands on my heart, then bent over and seemed to be listening to my chest. His touch was warm, then cold, then warm, but the overall effect was to send a sense of well-being through my entire body.

"You're not breathing normally," he said after a moment of unnerving silence. "I feel no harmony."

How did he know that? But he was right. I felt the way I had the first time I tried to sit in Zen meditation in Kyoto. As then, my body was relaxing but my wayward brain was still coursing.

"I'll try," I said, attempting to go along. What I really was feeling was the overwhelming sense of his presence, drawing me to him.

Next he moved around behind me and cradled my head in his hands, placing his long fingertips on my forehead, sort of the same way he'd done when I was standing with him on the windy heath, nursing a killer cold. All the while, the drone seemed to be increasing to a piercing, overwhelming volume, as though a powerful electrical force were growing in the room, sending me into an alpha state of relaxation.

"What are you doing? Is this how you do an exam for—?"

"The medical tests you had showed there's nothing wrong with your uterus or your Fallopian tubes, nothing that should inhibit conception. There's no need to pursue that any further. But the mind and the body are a single entity that must be harmonized, must work as one. Although each individual has different energy flows, I think my regimen here could be very helpful to you. Already I can tell your problem is a

self-inflicted trauma that has negated the natural condition wherein your mind and body work in unison."

"What 'trauma'?" I asked.

He didn't answer the question. Instead he began massaging my temples.

"Breathe deeply. And do it slowly, very slowly."

As I did, I felt a kind of dizziness gradually coming over me, the hypnotic drone seeming to take over my consciousness. Instead of growing slower, my breathing was actually becoming more rapid, as though I'd started to hyperventilate. But I no longer had any control over it. My autonomic nervous system had been handed over to him, as dizziness and a sense of disorientation settled over me. The room around me began to swirl, and I felt my conscious mind, my will, slipping out of my grasp. It was the very thing I'd vowed not to let happen.

The same thing had occurred once before, after I broke my collarbone in the Pacific surf that slammed a Mexican beach south of Puerto Villarta. When a kindly Mexican doctor was later binding on a harness to immobilize my shoulder, the pain was such that I momentarily passed out while sitting on a stool in his office. I didn't fall over or collapse; it just seemed as though my mind, fleeing the incredible pain, drifted away in a haze of sensation.

Now the pastel blue walls of the room slowly faded to white, and then I was somewhere else, a universe away, surrounded by blank nothingness. I tried to focus on the bronze Shiva directly across, but the ring of fire around him had become actual flames. The only reality left was the powerful touch of Alex Goddard's hands and a drone that could have been the music of the spheres.

[Chapter Eight]

Sometime thereafter, in a reverie, I felt myself in a magical forest whose lush vines reminded me of Kerala in India. It was a verdant, hazy paradise, another Eden. A child was with me, a child of my own, and I felt jubilation. I watched the child as she grew and became a resplendent orchid.

But with childbearing came pain, and I seemed to be feeling that pain as I took up the flower and held it, joy flowing through me.

Then Alex Goddard drifted into my dream, still all in white, and he was gentle and caring as he again moved his hands over me, leaving numbness in their wake. I thought I heard his voice talking of the miracle that he would make for me. A miracle baby, a beautiful flower of a child. I asked him how such a thing would happen. A miracle, he whispered back. It will be a miracle, just for you. When he said it, the orchid turned into the silver face of a cat, a vaguely familiar image, smiling benignly, then transmuted back into a blossom.

Then he drifted out of my dream much as he had come, a wisp of white, leaving me holding the gorgeous flower against my breasts, which had begun to swell and spill out milk the color of gold. . . .

A wet coolness washed across my face, and—as I faintly heard the sounds of Bach's Well-Tempered Clavier, Glenn Gould's piano notes crisp and clear—I opened my eyes to

see Ramala massaging my brow with a damp cloth. She smiled kindly and lovingly as she saw my eyes open, then widen with astonishment.

"What—?"

"Hey, how're you doing? Don't be alarmed. He's taking great care of you."

"What. . . where am I?" I lifted my head off the pillow and tried to look around. I half expected Steve to be there, but of course he wasn't.

"You're here. At Quetzal Manor." She reached and did something and the music slowly faded away. "Don't worry. You'll be fine. I think the doctor was trying to release your Chi, and when he did it was too strong for you."

"What day is it?" I felt completely disoriented my bearings gone.

"Sunday. It's Sunday morning." She reached and touched my brow as though giving me a blessing. Like, it's okay, really.

At that moment, Alex Goddard strolled in, dressed again in white.

Just as in the dream, I thought.

"So, how's the patient?" He walked over—eyes benign and caring—and lifted my wrist, absently taking my pulse while he inserted a digital thermometer in my ear. For a flashback moment he merged into, then emerged from, my dream. "You're looking fine. I have to say, though, you had quite a time yesterday."

"All I remember is passing out in your office," I mumbled glancing around at the gray plastic thermometer. And that strange dream, you telling me I would have a miracle baby.

"You had an unusual reaction," he went on. "You remember I spoke to you about mind-body harmony. You see what can happen when I redirect the flows of energy, Chi, from your body to your mind." He smiled and settled my wrist back onto the bed. "Don't worry. I have a lot of hope for you. You're going to do fine."

He looked satisfied as he consulted the thermometer, then jotted down my temperature on a chart. He's already started a medical record, I thought. Why?

"I'm . . . I'm wondering if this really is working out," I said. It was dawning on me that I was getting into Alex Goddard's world a lot deeper and a lot faster than I'd expected. I'd come planning to be an observer and now I was the one being observed. That was exactly not how I'd intended it. Maybe, I thought, if I back off and make a new run, I can keep us on equal footing. "Perhaps I ought to just go back to the city for a few days and—"

"I'd assumed you came to begin the program." He looked at me, a quick sadness flooding his eyes. "You struck me as a person who would follow through."

"I need to think this over" I really feel terrible, I thought, trying to rise up. What did he do to me? "Maybe I'm just not right for your 'program'?" The idea of a documentary had momentarily retreated far into the depths of my mind.

"On the contrary." He smiled. "We've shown that you're very responsive."

"Maybe that's it. Maybe I'm too responsive." I rose and slipped my feet off the bed. The motion brought a piercing pain in my abdomen. "OUCH! What's . . ." I felt my pelvis, only to find it was very sensitive.

Pulling aside my bed shift, I gazed in disbelief at my lower abdomen. There were red spots just above my pale blue panties.

Alex Goddard modestly averted his eyes. "I didn't want to say anything," he explained to the wall above my head, "but you were in pretty delicate shape there for a while. Mild convulsions, and I think your digestive system had gone into shock. The stomach is a center of energy, because it's constantly active. So I gave you some shots of muscle relaxant. Nothing serious. It's an unusual treatment, but I've found it works. It . . . modulates the energy flows. I also took a blood sample for some tests, but the results were all normal."

He then asked me about my menstrual cycle, exact days, saying he wanted to make sure it wasn't just routine cramps. "The seizure you had passed almost as soon as it came, but you might actually have been hallucinating a bit. You had a slight fever all night."

"Well . . ." Something like that had happened to me years ago in rural Japan, when I stupidly ate some unwashed greens and my stomach went into shock. At one point a local doctor, Chinese, was trying acupuncture, which also left me sore.

"Nothing to be worried about," he continued. "But if you're the least bit concerned, maybe we ought to do a quick sonogram, take a sound picture. Ease your mind that everything's okay."

"That doesn't really seem necessary," I said. For a clinic specializing in "energy flows" and "mind-body" programs, there was a lot of modern equipment. Odd.

"Won't do a bit of harm." He nodded at Ramala, who also seemed to think it was a good idea. "Come on, help me walk her down to the lab." He turned back. "It's totally noninvasive. You'll see for yourself that you're fine."

Before I could protest, I found myself walking, with some dizziness, down the hallway. This part of Quetzal Manor, which I had not seen before, was a sterile, high-tech clinic. I realized I was in a different building from the old convent, probably the new one I'd noticed across the parking lot, the one he hadn't bothered to mention that first day. But all I could focus on were the blue walls and the new white tiles of the floor.

The sonogram was as he described it, quick and noninvasive. He rubbed the ultrasound wand over my abdomen, watching the picture on a CRT screen, which showed my insides, a jumble of organs that he seemed to find extremely informative.

"Look." He pointed. "Those lines there are your Fallopian tubes, and that's your uterus." He pushed a button to record a digital image. "Seems like whatever was upsetting your stomach is gone. Obviously nothing's wrong here."

"Good," I said, "because I really need to take a few days and think this over."

"You should stay," he said, reaching to touch my hand. "I think the worst is well behind us. From here on, we can work together. In fact, what I actually wish you would do is come with me to my clinic in Central America. It's truly a place of miracles."

I assumed he was referring to the "special place" he'd mentioned during our first interview. If Quetzal Manor was on the exotic side, I thought, what must that place be like? A documentary that took in the totality of who and what he was could be—

"In fact," he went on, "I just learned I have to be going there later today. A quick trip to catch up on some things. So this would be an ideal time for you to come. We could go together."

Well, I thought, I'd love to see what else he's up to, but this whole scene is getting out of control. When I first met Alex Goddard, we had a power balance, but now he's definitely calling the shots.

"I don't think I'm ready for that kind of commitment yet."

"As you wish." He smiled with understanding. "But let me just say this. It's not going to be easy, but nothing I've seen so far suggests there's any physical reason why you can't have a child. We just need to get you in touch with the energy centers in your body. Rightness flows from that."

"You really think so?" In spite of myself I felt my hopes rising, even though I had definite mixed feelings about his kind of "holistic" medicine.

"I'm virtually certain. But whether you want to continue with the program or not is a decision you'll have to make for yourself."

"Well, maybe when I'm feeling better we can talk some more about it." I definitely needed to reconsider my game plan. "For now, I think I'd better just get my things and—"

"As you wish." He sighed. "Your clothes are in your room. There's a closet in the corner by the window."

I shot a glance at him. "Does my Blue Cross cover this?"

“On the house." A dismissive wave of his hand, and another kindly smile.

I was still feeling shaky as I moved back down the vacant hallway, but I refused to let either of them help me. Instead I left him to oversee Ramala as she shut down the equipment.

Oddly, the place still seemed vacant except for me, though there was a large white door that appeared to lead to another wing. What was in there? I wondered. The questions kept piling up.

It soon turned out I was wrong about the clinic being empty. When I reached the door to the room where I'd been, I thought I heard a shuffling sound inside. I pushed it open gingerly and saw the room was dark. It hadn't been when I left. The shuffling noise—I realized it was somebody closing the Venetian blinds—immediately stopped.

I began feeling along the wall for the light switch.

"Please leave it off," said a spacey female voice. "It's nice when it's dark."

As my eyes became accustomed to the eerie half-light, I finally made out a figure. It was a short woman, childlike but probably mid-twenties.

"What are you doing in here?"

"I just wanted to, like, be with you." She'd done her dark hair in multiple braids, with a red glass bead at the end of each. "You're special. We all know it. That's why he brought you over here, to this building. To be near them."

"What do you mean, 'special'?" I asked, heading for the closet and my black jeans. Then I wondered. Near who?

Now she was reaching into a fanny pack she had around her waist and taking out a baggie filled with plastic vials. "These are herbs I've started growing here. I picked them for you. If you'll—"

"Slow down," I said, lifting my jeans off the hanger and starting to struggle into them. Finally I took the baggie, moved to the window, and tilted up the blind. Inside it were clear plastic medicine bottles containing various gray and green powders and flakes.

My God, what's she trying to give me? And why?

"Listen," she went on, insistent. "Take those. Put two teaspoons of each in water you've boiled and drink it. Every day for a week. They'll make you strong. Then you'll be—"

"Hey, I'm going to be just fine, really." I set them aside and studied her, still a ghostlike figure in the semi dark. There was a wildness in her eyes that was very disturbing.

At that moment, Alex Goddard appeared in the doorway. He clicked on the light, looking puzzled.

"Couldn't find the switch?" Then he glanced around. "Tara, did you get lost? I thought you were doing your meditation. It's Sunday. Afterwards, though, you can weed the north herb boxes if you want."

She nodded silently, then grabbed the baggie and glided out, her brown eyes filled with both reverence and what seemed like fear.

"Who was that?" I asked, staring after her, feeling unsettled by the whole experience. "She seemed pretty intense."

"Tara's been pretty intense for some time, perhaps for much of her life," he declared with a note of sadness as he closed the door behind her. "I've not been able to do anything for her, but I've let her stay on here since she has nowhere else to go. She loves the gardens, so I've let her work out there. It seems to improve her self-esteem, a kind of benign therapy, her own natural path toward centering."

Well, I thought, she certainly could use some "centering."

"Look, Dr. Goddard, let me get my things, and then I've got to be going. I can't start on anything right now. Not the way I'm feeling. And visiting your other clinic is completely out of the question, at least for the moment."

"I have great hopes for you," he said again, placing a gentle hand on my shoulder. "I'm sorry we can't begin to work together immediately. But do promise me you'll reconsider and come back soon."

"Maybe when I'm feeling better." Keep the option open, I told myself. For a lot of reasons.

"In that case, Ramala can show you out. I've arranged for her to give you some herbal extracts from the rain forest that could well start you on the road to motherhood. Whether you decide to come back or not, I know they'll help you."

And he was gone, a wisp of white moving out the doorway. It was only then that I realized I'd again been too preoccupied to ask him about Kevin and Rachel, the beautiful siblings born six months apart. Instead all I had left was a memory of those penetrating eyes. And the power, the absolute power.

[Chapter Nine]

After giving me a small bag with two bottles, Ramala led me out, and I discovered I really had been in a different building, the one situated across the long-term parking lot and all but hidden in the trees. It was new, one-story, and probably larger than it appeared from the front. Again I wondered what went on in there, since it seemed so empty.

Check it out and soon, I told myself as I slipped my key into the ignition. You've got to find out a lot more about this place.

On the drive back to the city, my main thought was that I'd lost a day of my life. It'd just sort of slipped away. But that wasn't all. I also began to meditate on the fact that Alex Goddard could have an immense influence over my body (or was it my mind?) with a simple touch. Give him his due, he could definitely make things happen. First my cold and now this. Perhaps he could give me a child, if I got "centered," whatever that meant. But why should I trust him?

And there was another problem. For a baby I'd need Steve, the man I loved, the guy who'd promised to be with me through thick and thin. Did he really mean it? He'd have to fly in, which meant a serious piece of change for the airfare. Finally, could he face another chance of failure? My spirits sank at the prospect of having to ask him. Were we both just going to be humiliated one more time?

He'd made his home base in Belize, that little Rhode Island of a country abutting big, bad Guatemala. He liked the fact they used English, more or less, as the official language and they hadn't gotten around to murdering two hundred thousand Maya, the way Guatemala had. In a romantic moment, I'd programmed his Belize hotel number into the memory of my cell phone—the telephones down there are amazingly good, maybe the Brit legacy—though I'd never actually tried it. (I'd called him from home about half a dozen times, but he was rarely there.) Well, I thought, the time has come. Maybe it was the sensual feelings released by all the Chi flowing around, but for some reason I found myself feeling very lonely. He hadn't called recently, though. . . .

It took ten rings, but eventually the hotel answered. A moment later, they were trying his room. I guess I was half afraid a woman might pick up, but it was him and there were no hushed tones or cryptic monosyllables. I heaved a minor sigh of reassurance.

"Baby, I can't believe it's you," he declared. "I've actually been trying to reach you for a day now."

"You finally get around to missing me?" It was so good to hear his voice, full of life and energy.

"All the time. Never didn't. You've just got to understand it's crazy down here. All last week I was in Honduras, haggling over permits. Don't ask." He paused. "So, when are you coming down? They've got a national park here that's a pure chunk of rain forest, jaguars everywhere." He laughed. "But forget that. If you come down, we'll never get out of the hotel. Just room service all day."

"No immediate plans," I said, immediately wondering how I could swing it. "But you never know."

I wasn't entirely sure how to approach Steve anymore. There was something about the abrupt way he took off that left things up in the air. A tiny sliver of uneasiness was slipping into my head-over-heels trust, the camel's nose under the tent.

"First the good news," I declared. "David's talking to Orion about a theatrical release for Baby Love."

Steve knew how deeply I longed for a theatrical—it would be my first—and he enthused appropriately. But he also knew I wouldn't call him early Sunday morning just to tell him that. There was only one other thing that would inspire such an unsocialized act.

"Uh, should I be asking how the other baby project is going?" he said.

For a moment I wasn't sure what to say, since I didn't really even know myself.

"Still a work in progress," I said finally. Then; "Honey, I've just been to see a doctor who's . . . well, he's a little unconventional. And nervous-making. But everything else has failed."

Whereupon I gave him a quick, cell-phone summary of what I'd just been through at Quetzal Manor.

"So are you going to go back eventually?" He sounded uneasy. "For the full 'program'?"

He had a way of zeroing in on essentials. The truth was, my baby hopes and my sense of self-preservation were at war with each other. . . .

"Morgy, are you there?"

"I'm here. And I guess the answer is, I'm still trying to decide. Like I said, he's into Eastern medicine and Native American . . . I'm not sure what. But if I need you, are you still in the project?"

"What do you mean?"

"Darlin', don't play dumb. You know exactly what I mean. Could you come back if I needed you? Really needed you?"

There was a long pause, wherein the milliseconds dragged by like hours. Trees were gliding past, throwing shadows on

my windshield, and I still felt vaguely dizzy. I also had a residual ache in my abdomen where Alex Goddard had given me those damned muscle-relaxant shots. Why was I even considering going back?

Finally: "You're not making this easy, you know. Down here, without our . . . project on the front burner every day, I've been reassessing . . . well, a lot of things. If we had a baby, it would turn our lives upside down. I mean, it's not like we just bought a sheepdog and chipped in on the grooming. This is a human life we're talking about. Are we really prepared to do justice to a child?"

There it was. I didn't know whether I wanted to burst into tears, or strangle the man.

"Well, why don't you just think about it," I told him. "This doesn't sound like a conversation we should be having on a cell phone." Blast him. "If that's the way you feel now, then I might just have a baby on my own." How, I wasn't sure. I'd been so certain we were a couple, I'd not given it any real thought. "Or then again, I might just go ahead and adopt, with or without you."

"Look, I'm not saying I won't do it. I'm just saying it's not a trivial thing." He paused. "So where does that leave us?"

Translation: second thoughts.

"I don't know where that leaves us, Steve. In the shit, I guess. But I'd still like to know if I can count on you, or am I going to have to go to a sperm bank or something?"

"Jesus. Let me think about this, okay? Do I have to answer you now?"

"No. But I'm not going to wait forever either."

"All right." Then he paused. "Morgy, I miss you. I really do. I just need some time to think about our next step. Are you sure you're okay? You sound a little out of it."

"Thanks for asking. I've just got a lot on my mind."

Turmoil, dismay, and hope, all tossed together, that was what I had on my mind. I really didn't need mixed signals from Steve at the moment.

A few more awkward pleasantries and I clicked off the phone, wiped the streaks from my cheeks, and abruptly sensed Alex Goddard's face floating through my psyche. Why was that? Then I looked down at the bottles on the seat beside me, the "herbal extracts" Ramala had given me on the way out. What, I wondered, should I do about them? For that matter, what were they anyway? And what did they have to do with "centering"? If I started on his homeopathic treatments, what would I be getting into? Then I lectured myself: Never take something when you don't know what it is.

Hannah Klein. That's who I should ask.

I was so focused, I pushed the number I had stored for her in my phone memory before I remembered it was Sunday. Instead of getting her office, I got an answering service.

"Do you want to leave the doctor a message?" a southern-sounding voice enquired.

Without thinking, I heard myself declaring, "No, this is an emergency."

What am I saying? I asked myself. But before I could take it back, Hannah was on the line.

I know how intruded on I feel when an actor calls me at home on Sunday to bitch. Better make this good, I told myself.

"I was at an infertility clinic yesterday and passed out," I began. "And now I have some herbs to take, but I'm . . . well, I'm not sure about them."

"What 'clinic'?" she asked. There was no reprimand for calling her on Sunday morning.

When I told her about Alex Goddard, she said little, but she did not sound impressed. Looming there between us like the dead elephant on the living room floor was the fact that she'd specifically warned me not to go near him. And after what had just happened, there was a good case she might be right.

"Can I buy you brunch?" I finally asked, hoping to lure her back onto my case. "I'd really like to show you these herbs he gave me and get your opinion."

"I was just headed out to Zabar's to get something," she said, somewhat icily. Well, I suppose she thought she had good reason. "I'll get some bagels and meet you at my office."

Sunday traffic on upper Broadway was light, and I lucked out and found a parking space roughly two blocks from her building. It was one of the low-overhead "professional" types with a single small elevator and no doorman. When I got there, the lobby was empty.

Her suite was on the third floor, and I rang the bell before I realized the door was open. She was back in her office, behind the reception area, taking off her coat, when I marched in.

While she was unwrapping her sesame bagels, smoked sturgeon, and cream cheese with chives, she got an earful. My feeling was I'd better talk fast, and I did. I told her everything I could think of about what had happened to me at Quetzal Manor. I didn't expect her to make sense of it from my secondhand account, but I wanted to set the background for my next move.

"When I was leaving, his assistant gave me these two bottles of gel-caps. She said they're special herbal extracts he makes from plants in the rain forest. Do you think I ought to take them?"

I suspected I already knew the answer. Given her previously voiced views on Alex Goddard, I doubted she would endorse any potions he might dispense. But plant medicine has a long history. At least she might know if they presented any real danger.

She was schmearing cream cheese on the bagels, but she put down the plastic knife, took the two bottles, and examined them skeptically.

"These are not 'herbal extracts,' " she declared giving her first analysis before even opening them. "They're both manufactured drugs. The gel-caps have names on them. It's a Latin American pharmaceutical company."

Then she opened the first bottle, took out one of the caps, crushed it between her fingers, and sniffed.

"Uh-huh, just what I thought." Then she touched a pinch of the white powder to her tongue. "Right." She made a face and wiped her tongue with a tissue. "Except it's much stronger than the usual version. I can tell you right now that this drug, in this potency, is illegal in the U.S."

What was it? I wondered. Cocaine? And how could she tell its potency with just a taste? Then I reminded myself why I'd come to her in the first place: She'd been around the track many, many times.

"It's gonadotropin," she said glaring at me. Like, you damned fool. "I'm virtually certain. The trade name here in the U.S. is Pergonal, though that's not what this is. This is a much stronger concoction, and I can see some impurities." She settled the bottle onto her desk with what seemed almost a shudder. "This is the pharmaceutical equivalent of hundred-and-ninety-proof moonshine."

"What is it? What's it supposed it do?" Jesus, I thought, what's he giving me?

"It's a hormone extracted from the urine of menopausal women. It triggers a greater than normal egg production and release. It's sometimes prescribed together with Lupron, which causes your body to release a similar hormone. Look, if you want to try Pergonal, the real version, I'll write you a prescription, though I honestly don't think it's going to do you the slightest bit of good."

I couldn't believe what I was hearing. I'd almost been considering giving Alex Goddard the benefit of the doubt, at least till I found out more about him, and now he hands me this.

Now we both were looking at the other bottle.

"What do you think that is?" I asked, pointing.

She broke the plastic seal, opened it, and looked in. It too was a white powder sealed in gel-caps, and she gave one a sniff, then the taste test.

"I have no idea."

She set the bottle back on her desk, and I stared at it, terrified of what it might be. Finally I got up my courage and reached for it. A white sticker had been wrapped around it, with directions for taking . . . whatever it was . . . written on it. Then I happened to notice that one corner showed the edge of another label, one beneath the hand-applied first one. I lifted a letter opener off her desk and managed to get it under the outer label. With a little scraping and tugging, I got it off.

"Does this mean anything to you?" I asked her, handing it back. "It's in Spanish, but the contents seem to be HMG Massone."

"I don't believe it," she said, taking the bottle as though lifting a cobra. I even got the distinct feeling she didn't want to leave any fingerprints on it. "That's an even more powerful drug to stimulate ovarian follicles and induce superovulation. It's highly illegal in this country. Anybody who gives these drugs in combination to a patient is flirting with an ethics charge, or worse."

I think I gasped. What was he trying to put into my body?

She settled the bottle back on the desk, her eyes growing narrow. "Since you say his 'nurse' or assistant or whatever she was gave you this, I suppose there's always the chance she made an innocent mistake. But still, what's he doing with this stuff at all? They manufacture it down in Mexico, and also, I've heard, somewhere in Central America, but it's not approved in the U.S. Anybody who dispenses this to a patient is putting their license at risk." She paused to give me one of those looks. "Assuming Alex Goddard even has a medical license. These 'alternative medicine' types sometimes claim they answer to a higher power, they're board-certified by God."

"I don't for a minute think it was an 'innocent mistake.' " I was beginning to feel terribly betrayed and violated. I also was getting mad as hell, my fingertips tingling. "But why would he give me these drugs at all? Did he somehow—?"

"I think you'd better ask him," she said passing me a bagel piled high with cream cheese and sturgeon.

She bit into her own bagel and for a while we both just chewed in silence. I, however, had just lost all my appetite. Alex Goddard who might well be my last chance for a baby, had just dispensed massive doses of illegal drugs to me. Which, my longtime ob/gyn was warning me, were both unnecessary and unethical.

"What do you think I should do?" I asked finally, breaking the silence but barely able to get my voice out.

She didn't say anything. She'd finished her bagel, and now she'd begun wrapping up the container of cream cheese, folding the wax paper back over the remaining sturgeon. I thought her silent treatment was her way of telling me my brunch consultation was over. She clearly was exasperated with me.

"Let me tell you a story," she said finally, as she carefully began putting the leftover sturgeon back into the Zabar's bag. "When I was eight years old all the Jews in our Polish ghetto were starving because the Nazis refused to give us food stamps. So my father bribed a Nazi officer to let him go out into the countryside to try to buy some eggs and flour, anything, just so we could eat. The farmer came that Saturday morning in a horse-drawn wagon to pick up my father. At the last minute, I asked to go with him and he let me. That night the Nazis liquidated our entire ghetto, almost five thousand people. No one else in my family survived. Not my mother, not my two sisters, not anyone."

Her voice had become totally dispassionate, matter-of- fact, as though repression of the horror was the only way a sane person could deal with it. She could just as easily have been describing a country outing as she continued. I did notice, however, that her East European accent had suddenly become very prominent, as though she was returning there in her thoughts.

"When we learned what had happened, my father asked the farmer we were visiting to go to a certain rural doctor we knew and beg him to give us some poison, so we could commit suicide before the Nazis got us too. The doctor, however, told him he had only enough poison for his own family. He did, however, give him a prescription for us. But when my father begged that farmer to go to a pharmacy and get the poison, he and his entire family refused. Instead, they hid us in their barn for over a year, even though they knew it meant a firing squad if the Nazis found us." She glared at me. "Do you understand what I'm saying? They told us that if we wanted to do something foolish because we were desperate, we would have to do it without their help."

It was the first time I ever knew her real story. I was stunned.

"What, exactly, are you driving at?" I think I already knew. The long, trusting relationship we'd shared was now teetering on the brink. By going to see Alex Goddard—even if it was partly a research trip to check him out—I had disappointed her terribly. She'd lost respect for me. She thought I was desperate and about to embark on something foolish.

"I'm saying do whatever you want." She got up and lifted her coat off the corner rack. "But get those drugs out of here. I don't want them anywhere near this office. I tried everything legal there was to get you pregnant. If that wasn't good enough for you and now you want to go to some quack, that's your affair. Let me just warn you that combining gonadotropin and HMG Massone at these dosages is like putting your ovaries on steroids; you get massive egg production for a couple of cycles, but the long-term damage could be severe. I strongly advise you against it, but if you insist and then start having complications, I would appreciate not being involved."

Translation: If you start fooling around with Alex Goddard, don't ever come back.

It felt like a dagger in my chest. What was I going to do? One thought: Okay, so these drugs aren't the way, but you couldn't help me get pregnant. All I did was spend twenty thousand dollars on futile procedures. Not to mention the heartbreak.

"You know," I said finally, maybe a little sharply, "I think we ought to be working together, not at cross-purposes."

"You're welcome to think what you like," she bristled. "But I have to tell you I don't appreciate your tone."

I guess I'd really ticked her off, and it hurt to do it. Then, finally, her own rejection of me was sinking in.

"So that's it? You're telling me if I try anything except exactly what you want me to, then just don't ever come back."

"I've said all I intend to." She was resolutely ushering me toward the door, her eyes abruptly blank.

Well, I told myself, going from anger to despair, then back to anger, whatever else I might think about Alex Goddard, at least he doesn't kick people out because of their problems, even a sad soul like Tara.

Still, what about these illegal drugs? There I was, caught in the middle—between an honorable woman who had failed, and Alex Goddard, who'd just lived up to my worst suspicions. Heading down in the elevator, alone, I could still hear Hannah Klein's rejection, and warning, ringing in my ears. Maybe she had just confirmed that still, small voice of rationality lecturing me from the back of my mind.

I marched out onto the empty Sunday streets of upper Broadway, and when I got to the corner, I stood for a long moment looking up at the pitiless blue of the sky. The sun was there, but in my soul I felt all the light was gone.

Finally I opened the first bottle and then, one by one, I began taking out the gel-caps and dropping them into the rainwater grate there at my feet, watching them bounce like the metal sphere in an old pinball machine before disappearing into the darkness below. When both bottles were empty, I tossed them into the wire trash basket I'd been standing next to.

The next time I saw Alex Goddard, he was going to have a hell of a lot of explaining to do. Beginning with why he'd given me a glimmer of hope, only to then cruelly snatch it back. I found myself hating him with all my being.

[Chapter Ten]

I headed on back downtown, planning to take a bath, change clothes, and then recalibrate my game plan. Maybe, I thought, I ought to just go up to the editing room at Applecore, try some rote work to help tranquilize my thoughts.

But first things first. About halfway there, at Thirty-eighth Street, I pulled over and double-parked by a Korean deli, and surveyed the flowers they had out front, an array of multicolored blooms that virtually blocked entry to the doorway of the tiny grocery. Azaleas, chrysanthemums, birds-of-paradise, but I wanted the pink roses. At ten dollars a bunch, they seemed the right touch. I dug out a twenty and picked two.

Still standing on the street, I pulled them to me and inhaled deeply. As far back as I could remember, I'd always loved the scent of roses. I'd never really thought myself pretty, the natural-blond often-dyed-brown hair notwithstanding, but just having roses around somehow made me feel that way. I wanted to be engulfed in them, especially any time confusion threatened to get the upper hand.

Five minutes later and I was at Twenty-first Street. I'd arrived. My refuge, my one-bedroom cocoon. Time to collapse into a hot bath, wonder why Alex Goddard had given me illegal drugs, and contemplate roses. I was looking for a parking space when my cell phone rang. No, don't bother, I told myself. Enough intrusion for one day. Then I remembered I'd sprung for the caller-ID feature, and I glanced down at the little liquid crystal slot. It was a number I happened to know, Lou's place downtown. One eye still on the street, I reached over and picked it up.

"Finally got you," he boomed. "Where the heck are you?"

"I just got home from—"

"Yeah, I know where you been. Dave told me." He paused, as though he was holding off on some important announcement. "Hang on a sec. There's somebody here might like to speak to you."

I thought about Lou's makeshift digs, lots of "heirloom"—worn-out—family furniture he'd lugged along with him. Sarah and I used to play on the couch, and it still had a dim mauve stain where I'd once dumped a glass of "grape" Kool-Aid on her head when she was six. Whatever else, definitely not a Soho look.

Then I heard a whispery voice.

"Hi, Morgy."

It was a tentative utterance I'd heard only once before, when she was waking up after falling off a playground swing. She'd been knocked out cold for a moment and I'd been frantic, wetting a handkerchief in the nearby fountain and desperately rubbing it over her face. When she came to, she'd gazed up into my eyes and greeted me as though we'd just met.

My God!

Before I could recover and say anything, Lou came back on. "We're practicing eating chicken-noodle soup. And we're trying to do a little talking. Why don't you come on down? She asked about you earlier this morning, said, 'Where's Morgy?' "

"Lou! This is incredible!"

"You gotta believe in miracles, right? Just come on down."

"Is she . . . God, you've got it." My hopes went into orbit as I clicked off the phone and revved my engine.

I could have swamped him with a lot of questions then and there, but I immediately decided I wanted to see her first, with my own eyes. I still couldn't quite believe it was true. On the other hand, a weekend partial recovery was not totally beyond the realm of medical possibility. With a coma, so little is understood that anything's possible. Lou was right. This was definitely a weekend of the unexpected.

I'd been close to the deaths of people near to me, both my parents for starters, but I'd never been close to the restoration of life. It's hard to explain the rush of joy when you think somebody is gone for good and then they pop up again, like they'd never been lost. And with Sarah that feeling was especially jarring. It was almost as though some part of me had come back alive.

The fact is, since Sarah and I were both only children, we'd identified a lot with each other. True, we'd traveled our separate paths, each looking, perhaps, for something to fill the lonely void in our lives that a sibling might have taken. As a child of the dusty, empty plains of West Texas, I didn't see other kids very much during the summer, and I made up reasons why she and I should visit each other as often as possible.

Once, when I was plowing, turning over oat stubble—yes, my dad warily let me do that if I asked—I unearthed a rabbit nest full of little baby cottontails. Sarah was coming to visit the next day, and I rescued the infants so we could play nursery. We fed them milk with little eyedroppers, and before long Sarah decided she was actually a reincarnated mother rabbit. That was when she became a vegetarian, and she remained so—by her account—till she finished college. It was just another of those magic moments of childhood I ended up sharing with her.

I also sometimes wondered, as you might have guessed, what it would've been like to be born a boy. I was definitely a tomboy, had a real collie (my own version of Lassie), liked to climb trees and dig holes in the hardscrabble West Texas earth. Maybe that was why I felt so at home—free associating now—when I filmed my documentary of the Maya village in Mexico's Yucatan. It was hot and dry and lay under a pitiless sun, a blazing white bone in the sky that seared the spare landscape. None of my crew could understand how anybody could bear to live in such a place, but to me it seemed perfectly natural, almost like home.

Thoughts of which now made me sad. I only wish my parents had lived long enough to see that documentary. Maybe then they'd have understood how terribly lonely I'd been as a child, a loneliness I shared so deeply with Sarah. Would we ever be together again?

On my hurried trip downtown, I kept wondering what I was about to encounter. Was it going to be the fantasy-bound Sarah of her girlhood, perhaps the same Sarah who'd spun out some stuttering vision of a jade mask? Or would all that be past and would she again be the ambitious, sparkling pre- med student she'd become when she was in college?

Getting to Soho took only about ten minutes, scant time to think. Lou's place was in what had once been a garment factory sweatshop. He'd rented it from another agent at the bureau, who had inherited it from a cousin, a well-known downtown artist, lately dead of AIDS. Lou paid virtually no rent, was there mainly to keep out squatters, and couldn't care less that he was living in one of New York's trendier sections. All he knew was that there was plenty of room, and free parking on the street for his old Buick.

I'd been down many times before. Inside, the space was still inhabited spiritually by the dead artist, with acrylic paint spattered on walls and graffiti I didn't fully understand in the bathroom. The place seemed to be a broom-free area, with layers of the past littered on the floor like an archaeological excavation. And the old Kool-Aid-stained furniture, fitting right in.

What always struck me, though, was the number of photos of Sarah. They were everywhere in the open space, on tables, the desk, several on the walls. Mostly they were old, several blown up and cropped from snapshots, grainy. The space felt like a shrine to her memory.

When Lou let me in, I was greeted by a spectral face, a wheelchair, and a valiant attempt at smiling normalcy. Maybe Lou thought it was real, was progress, but I was immediately on guard.

It was Sarah's eyes that caught me. They pierced into my soul and we seemed to click, just like always, only this time it was as though all our life together passed between us. I had the sense she was trying to tell me something with her eyes that went beyond words, that she was trying to reach out to me, perhaps to recapture that shared understanding we'd had years ago.

Lou introduced me to a Mrs. Reilly, a kindly, Irish-looking practical nurse who was part of the outpatient package the hospital provided. She wore a white uniform and was around sixty, with short-bobbed gray hair and an air of total authority. She'd just finished feeding Sarah a bowl of soup, and was brushing out her cropped blond hair, what there was of it.

Mrs. Reilly glanced at me, but never broke the rhythm of her strokes. "She's tired now, but she's already stronger than she was."

Then Lou spoke up. "They called me early yesterday morning. But by the time I got around to trying to reach you, you'd vanished. So I rang Dave and he told me where you were, up there with that crackpot." He was grinning. No, make that beaming like the famous cat. "By last night, she was walking with some help, so they said she might as well be here. Like I said, it's a miracle."

"You brought her home just this morning?" I couldn't believe the hospital would discharge her so soon, but this was the HMO Age of medical cost-cutting.

"Only been here a couple of hours." He pointed to a shiny set of parallel steel railings in the corner. "That's for physical therapy. Right now she can only walk with somebody on either side holding her, but in a few days, I figure . . ." His voice trailed off, as though he didn't want to tempt fortune. Then he turned toward Sarah. "In a few days, right, honey?"

She nodded, then finally spoke directly to me. "Morgy, I want some clothes. Please. I hate these horrible hospital things. I never want to see them again."

I noticed that she'd started crying, a line of tears down each emaciated cheek. Was it something to do with seeing me? I wondered. Then she began trying to struggle out of the blue bed shift she was wearing, though she didn't have the strength.

"I'll get you something great, Sar, don't worry." I reached to stay her hand. It was, I thought, extraordinarily cold, even though the loft itself was warm as toast. What kind of clothes should I buy for her? I found myself wondering. Blouses with buttons? Pullovers? What could she manage? Maybe I'd bring some items from home first and let her try them out. We used to be about the same size, though now she was all skin and bones.

I moved a chair next to her, took her other hand, and leaned as close as I dared. I desperately wanted to put my arms around her, but I wasn't sure how she would respond to my touch. Her eyes, however, were clear and had never looked a deeper blue. "Sar, what's the matter? Why're you crying? You should be happy. Your dad's right here and he loves you and we're going to take wonderful care of you."

"Who? Him?" she asked, looking straight at Lou, her blue eyes like an unblinking camera's lens.

The plaintive question took my breath away. Hadn't they been talking for two days?

"Don't pay any attention when she says things like that," Mrs. Reilly declared, her voice just above a whisper. "She's still not quite herself. She drifts in and out."

She seemed to be drifting in and out at the moment, though it was mostly out.

Then she looked directly at me, only now her eyes were losing their laser-like focus, were starting to seem glazed. "Who're you?" She reached out and touched my unwashed hair, running her hands through the tangled strands.

Next she stared off, terrified, her eyes full of fear.

"The smoke," she whispered. "The knife. I'm next."

Abruptly she was off again in the reverie that had enfolded her that first time in the hospital. Or at least that was what I guessed.

"What are you talking about?" I felt like shaking her, except I was too shook-up myself.

She turned back, and for a moment she just stared glassy- eyed, first at me, next at Lou, and finally at Mrs. Reilly. Then she reached for a glass of orange juice on the table beside her. She looked at it as though it were some potion, then slowly drank it off, not pausing once. Outside, a faint police siren could be heard, and I was afraid it was distracting her. Anyway, something told me her momentary séance was played out. Her face had grown calm and rested, though I could barely repress a tremble.

"Whatever you think," I said finally, slipping an arm around her shoulder, "we're both right here. And we love you and we want to help you get better."

She didn't say anything more, just closed her eyes and drifted away. But it wasn't back into a coma, since her breathing was growing heavier. I wanted to grab her and yell at her and demand that she come back to us, but I was fearful of what effect it might have.

"What the hell was she talking about?" Lou asked finally, his voice quavering.

"I don't know," I said, as puzzled as he was.

That was when Mrs. Reilly spoke up. She was the only one not upset.

"When they come out of a coma, sometimes they're not right for a while." She patted Sarah's hand then gave it a solicitous squeeze. "I once had a man wake up and start talking about magic trips through the air, about how he was a dual citizen of the earth and the sea. He was talking like a lunatic. One day he would know his family, and the next he would look at them and start screaming they'd come to kill him. You just never know how these things will go at first. But she'll be herself before long." She lifted Sarah's limp hand up to her cheek, then kissed it. "You're going to be all right, dear. I've seen enough like you to know."

"Then what do you make of what she just said?" Lou asked her, having given up on me. "Earlier this morning she was fine. Knew who I was, everything. Then the minute Morgan comes in, she starts making up that loony jabber."

The sanguine Mrs. Reilly just shrugged as if it didn't really matter.

For my own part, I didn't necessarily like him implying my arrival had caused her to relapse into her dream world of terror. It seemed to me that whenever I showed up, she started trying to tell me what was really eating away at her soul.

Well, I told myself finally, maybe she's regressed back to when we were kids, when we only had each other to share our secrets with. What if we've rebonded in some new, spe

cial way? It would be natural, actually. She's trying to reach out to me, like long ago.

Now she appeared to be dozing off, exhausted, her head tipping downward toward her blue hospital shift. Mrs. Reilly took that as a hint, and slowly began wheeling her toward the bedroom, leaving me alone with Lou.

I glanced over at him, thinking more and more that I had to do something, track down what had happened to her. I wanted to do it for me, but even more for him. I'd never seen him so despondent. Maybe it was the thing scholars call the curse of rising expectations. Back when she was hardly more than a vegetable, he was overjoyed by a flickering eyelid. Now that she was talking, he wanted all of her back. Instead, though, it seemed as if she had returned to us for a moment, only to be snatched away again. I could tell it was killing him.

"Look, I'm sorry that when I showed up, she started going off the deep end." I wanted desperately to help, but at that moment I felt powerless. "Maybe I should just stay away for a while."

"Nah, she loves having you here. Don't worry. But anyway, Dave said something about you taking a couple of days off. Maybe I can use that time to be here with her and settle her down." Then he grimly took out her locket and rubbed its worn silver in his fingers, his eyes brimming with his heartache. "This is all just so damned confusing."

Was he telling me, indirectly, that I should go away and leave them alone? First Hannah Klein rejects me, and now et tu, Lou? Maybe, I thought, he's taking out his despair on me, blaming me for her relapse. Truthfully, I guess I was blaming myself a bit too.

"Listen, I'm going to go home now and leave you two alone," I said. "But why don't you see if you can get her to talk some more? Without me around, maybe she'll make more sense."

"If she wants to say something, I'll listen." He gave me a strong, absent embrace, his eyes still despondent. "But no way am I gonna start pushing her."

I edged into the bedroom, unsure if I really should, to say good-bye to Sarah and to give her one last hug. Her eyes were open again and she just stared at me for a second, then whispered a word I couldn't quite make out. It might have sounded like "Babylon," but that made no sense at all. Finally she covered her eyes with her hands and turned away, gone from me, leaving me more alone than I'd ever felt.

[ Chapter Eleven]

Heading home, finally, I told myself to try to calm down. I was determined to help Sarah get over her trauma, though truthfully I was too tired to really think straight at that moment. So instead I decided to let everything rest for a few hours and try for some distance. In fact, I began imagining myself in a hot bath, gazing at my now-wilting roses. Home Sweet Home.

Mine was a standard one-bedroom in a building that had been turned into a co-op five years earlier, the owner offering the individual apartments to the tenants. I'd stayed a renter, however, passing up the "low" insider price, $138,000, because I didn't really have the money, and when I did have it someday I would want something bigger. I wished I had more space—a real dining room and a bigger bathroom would do for starters, along with some place for more bookcases. And if a baby should someday miraculously come along . . .

I'd often thought you could tell a lot about somebody from where and how they lived; it's revealing as a Rorschach test. What, I often wondered, did my apartment say about me?

A decorator might conclude I'd done up the place with love, then lazily let it go. They'd decide I cared about nice things, but once those nice things were there, I neglected them. It would be true.

I'd covered the walls of the living room with pale blue cloth, then hung a lot of framed pictures and old movie posters. Okay, I like movies. For me even the posters are art. My couch was an off-white, more like dirt-colored actually, and covered with pillows for the "feminine" touch. I'd hoped you'd have to look twice to realize it was actually a storage cabinet in disguise, with drawers along the bottom of the front. The floor was polished hardwood, rugs from India here and there, in sore need of a vacuuming, and even a couple of deceased insects that'd been there for over a week. That sort of said it, I thought glumly. I'm a workaholic slob.

The bedroom revealed even more about me. The bed was a brass four-poster, queen-size, partly covered by an heirloom quilt. It hadn't been made in a week. (Who has the time?) The room itself was long and divided into areas for work and sleep. Opposite the bed itself was an antique English desk, on which sat my old Macintosh, and next to that was my file cabinet, the indispensable part of the "home office" the IRS loves to hate. On top of it was a stack of marked-up scripts, notes scribbled all over them in six different colors. You never realize movies are so complicated till you see a breakdown sheet. Camera angles and voice-overs and . . .

Next to the bed was a violin case and three books about Indian ragas. What was that about? somebody might wonder. Some kind of Indian music nut? I was, albeit a very minimally talented nut.

The kitchen was the New York efficiency kind painted a glossy tan, the color of aerosol olive oil. The cabinets contained mostly packages of pasta, instant soup, and coffee filters. Not even any real food. I live on deli takeout these days. An inventory of my fridge at this moment would clock two cartons of "fresh squeezed" orange juice, a half quart of spoiling milk, a bag of coffee beans, plastic containers of wilting veggies from the corner salad bar, and three bottles of New York seltzer. That was it.

God help me, I thought, my mind-state turning even more

morose. This is my life. I had become that retrograde Woman of the Nineties: works ninety hours a week, makes ninety thou a year, weighs ninety pounds, and thinks (pardon my French) Cooking and Fucking are provinces in northern China. Well, the ninety-pounds part of that obscene quip didn't fit—and it wasn't the nineties anymore, anyway.

In any case, was my apartment a place to raise a child? No earthly way. Like Carly, I'd have to spring for some decent space, preferably with a washing machine. . . .

A parking slot was open right in front of my building, a minor miracle on this day of uncertain events. As I was pulling in, I glanced over to see a man walking past, not catching the face but sensing something familiar in the walk. He was in the process of unbuttoning a Federal Express uniform, peeling away the top to reveal a dark suit. He certainly seemed to be in a big hurry, carrying an unmarked shopping bag. Maybe, I thought, his shift was over and he was meeting his wife, or a friend.

I wondered if he'd left a package for me, and told myself to check with the super. Not the usual delivery guy—did they come on Sunday now?—and also . . .

Where was the truck? They always parked right here by the building.

I was still so upset over Sarah, I couldn't immediately process those illogical observations, so I just grabbed my pink roses, dripping from the bottom of their paper wrapping, and opened the car door. It was definitely good to be home. I loved my Chelsea neighborhood, where you got to know the locals, running into them in the delis, the little restaurants, the dry cleaners. Just like a small town. If you worked at home, the way I sometimes did, you even got to know the mailman and the delivery guys for UPS and FedEx. . . .

Hey! That guy. I finally placed the walk, a kind of a strut. He was the slimeball who'd been outside Paula Marks' building last week, carrying a gun and threatening me. What's he doing here?

My pulse went off the charts. Was he one of Nicky Russo's wiseguy crew after all? Had he come back, with his pistol, to pay me a return engagement?

My God.

Chill out, I told myself, take a deep breath. He's leaving. Just try and find out who he is.

Roses in one hand held up awkwardly around my face, I slowly ambled down the street after him. I didn't have to go far. Within about a hundred feet, he unlocked a long black Lincoln Towncar, stepped out of the FedEx camouflage, tossed it onto the seat along with the bag he was carrying, pulled the cap off his bald head got in, and sped away.

The license plate looked different from the usual, but I got what I needed: DL and a string of numbers.

Uh-oh, I thought. Was he leaving a package bomb for me?

I turned back and let myself into the outer lobby, glancing around as I did. There were no parcels anywhere, just blank, brown tile.

My apartment was 3A. The name on the bell was M. James. As I stepped through the inner lobby—still no package—a rumpled face appeared in the doorway just to my left. The sign on it, flaking, said SUPER.

"Oh, hi." The voice was Patrick Mooney, our superintendent, who did not normally emerge to greet those arriving. But there had been complaints from the building's managing agent that he could never be found for emergencies, so he probably wanted to appear available, even on Sundays. His voice was slurred from some midday medicinal Irish whisky. "Thought you were home. FedEx guy was here earlier looking for you."

Oh, boy. "Did he leave a package?"

"He had something with him, if that's what you mean. Like a bag of some kind."

"And you let him go up?" I couldn't believe what I was hearing. I felt a rush of dismay.

"Said he had to. Needed a signature." Patrick Mooney then shrugged and reached for the dooijamb to steady himself, his whisky breath wafting across the hall. Great security.

I stepped into the elevator as the door was clanking shut, and watched as he rubbed his eyes and eased his own door closed.

Now I was really puzzled. If the FedEx guy came "earlier," why was he just now leaving? A lot of scary theories went through my mind as I pushed the button for the third floor.

I took a deep breath as the elevator opened, but again I saw no packages. So far so good. Getting off, I set down my roses on the hall carpet and fumbled for my key. When I inserted it, the lock felt a little rough, causing me to think for an instant I'd used the wrong key, but then it responded.

What had caused that? I wondered. Had the guy been fiddling with my door, wiring a bomb? Using one hand I pushed it open, again holding my breath and standing aside, but it opened okay. I exhaled, then reached back to drag in the flowers.

But if he didn't leave a package, what was he doing here? Casing out where I lived? Planting a bug in the elevator? And why was he here so long?

The place was dark when I stepped in, the drapes drawn. I relocked the door, then surveyed the gloom. No explosions, so I guessed he didn't plan to kill me. Yet. Here I was, home, safe and sound. I just stood a minute, still uneasy.

Then I remembered the flowers, my dripping bouquet, and headed for the kitchen. Deal with them, and then maybe get a bottle of white wine out of the fridge and sip some in the bath.

After my unnerving sequence with Sarah, thoughts of going to the office had zero appeal. Time to lighten up, way up.

Preoccupied, not looking around, I stuffed the roses into a vase by the sink, and then I thought again about the white wine and opened the refrigerator. I'd still not bothered to turn on any lights, but the kitchen and its ancient fridge were dimly illuminated by the tiny window just across. I wasn't sure where I'd put the bottle, since I'd had to rearrange things to make room for the dup of Carly's interview. (I was also planning to take home a safety dup of Paula's interview sometime later in the week.)

Why was I doing that? Taking home copies? It was a sign of deep compulsion. You couldn't really make a professional- quality second negative from a first positive—by that time it would be third-generation—but I'd brought it anyway. Now and then I just have a raw instinct that keeping a safety backup around is a good idea. But the canister had ended up devouring the entire lower shelf of the fridge.

I opened the white door and peered in. The light was out, and for a moment I stared numbly at the dark, half-filled shelves. The only thing that struck me as odd was that I could see the pure white of the empty bottom shelf.

For a second I could only stand and stare, but then I backed away, trying to figure out what was wrong, and stumbled over something. I regained my balance and flipped on the overhead light.

"What!"

The floor around me was littered with bottles, my old toaster, my tiny microwave. It was a total shambles.

I recoiled stumbling again, this time over cans strewn across the linoleum. My kitchen, it was slowly sinking in, had been completely trashed.

I felt a visceral wave of nausea. It's the scariest thing in the world having your space invaded like a form of psychic rape. I sagged against the refrigerator as I gazed around. The cabinets had been emptied out, a hasty and haphazard search. Quick and extremely dirty, as glass containers of condiments, including an old bottle of dill pickles, were shattered and their contents smeared into the floor.

"I don't believe this." I marched back into the living room and reached for the lights. This room too had been turned upside down. The TV, stereo, VCR, all had been swept onto the rug. But they were still there. That guy, that animal, who did this wasn't a thief. He'd been looking for something.

My breath now coming in pulses, I edged into the bedroom and switched on the light. The bed was the way I'd left it, the covers thrown back and the pillows in a pile. The clock radio was there, and so was the old Mac, still on the table in the far corner, my "workstation." Again nothing seemed to be missing.

I headed back to the kitchen, where the refrigerator door was still open. I gazed at the interior a moment, still puzzled, trying to figure out what wasn't right. . . .

Shit! Shit! Shit! That's what was wrong. The field of white bottom shelf was empty. Totally empty. The film canister of Paula's interview was gone.

For a moment I just leaned against the kitchen counter, barely pushing aside an impulse to throw up in the sink. Think, I told myself, get a grip and think. . . .

It was the film he'd wanted. And he'd wanted it badly enough to pick the lock, then rip my home apart looking for it.

I pulled at a tangle of hair, feeling my mind in chaos, and tried to reason out the situation. Why? Why would he steal a positive that couldn't be used for anything?

Finally the real truth of what had happened hit me like a fist in the chest. My Home Sweet Home had been violated.

Seething, I went into the living room and reached for the phone, the only thing not on the floor.

My first instinct was to call David, but then I decided he'd just go into a tizzy of hysteria and be no support at all. So instead I called Lou, praying I wouldn't wake Sarah. In an unsteady voice, I tried to tell him what had happened.

He seemed puzzled to hear from me again so soon, but then he quickly turned FBI, concerned for my safety.

"Guy sounds like a professional," he declared. "Probably got in with an electric picker, like the Edge. Any asshole can buy one for a hundred and thirty bucks. It'll rake cylinders at a hundred times a second. Pro like that, you can be sure there'll be no prints."

"But why would . . . ?" My voice was still a croak. "I mean, my God, all for a lousy reel of film?"

"Fucker wants you to know he's in town. So how he did it's as important as what he did. It's a time-proven scare tactic." He paused. "Morgan, I don't like this one bit. There could be more before this is over."

"Think I should call the cops?"

"Damned right you should," he said, slowly and sadly, "but to tell you the truth, they ain't gonna do all that much. Somebody messed up your apartment and lifted a third-hand copy of a woman talking. They'll say it sounds more like malicious mischief than a crime. Then they'll write it up and that'll be the last you'll hear from them."

"Well," I said, my anger welling up, "maybe I don't feel quite so laissez-faire. Tell me, you know anybody who can run a plate for you on a Sunday?"

"You got the prick's license number?" he exclaimed. "Why the hell didn't you say so?"

"Honestly, it sort of slipped my mind. I'm having a little trouble thinking straight right now."

Fortunately my short-term memory is pretty good, even when I'm stressed, so I spewed it out.