She was a child too much a part of her environment, too eager to grow and learn and experience. Once, they were at Easthampton for the summer (again, Fritzie said, a good place, even though they were being robbed). One soft evening -- that marvelous sea blessed time when the sun's departing warmth lingers and a smell of spume and wrack haunts everything -- Amy had picked herself off the floor and begun to walk. Fritzie was on the couch reading; Laura was sitting in an easy chair about eight feet away. The infant, in white terry-cloth bathrobe, her face intense and purposeful, had essayed a few wobbly steps toward her father. ``Y'all wanna walk -- walk,'' he said. Then, gently, he shoved her behind toward Laura. Amy walked -- making it halfway across the cottage floor. She lost not a second, picking herself up and continuing her pilgrimage to Laura. Then Laura took her gently and shoved her off again, toward Fritzie: Amy did not laugh -- this was work, concentration, achievement. In a few minutes she was making the ten foot hike unaided; soon she was parading around the house, flaunting her new skill.

Some liar's logic, a wisp of optimism as fragile as the scent of tropical blossoms that came through the window (a euphoria perhaps engendered by the pill Fritzie had given her), consoled her for a moment. Amy had to be safe, had to come back to them -- if only to reap that share of life's experiences that were her due, if only to give her parents another chance to do better by her. Through the swathings of terror, she jabbed deceit's sharp point -- Amy would be reborn, a new child, with new parents, living under new circumstances. The comfort was short-lived, yet she found herself returning to the assurance whenever her imagination forced images on her too awful to contemplate without the prop of illusion. Gazing at her husband's drugged body, his chest rising and falling in mindless rhythms, she saw the grandeur of his fictional world, that lush garden from which he plucked flowers and herbs. She envied him. She admired him.