She blinked a couple of times. Then she cleared her throat again. Man, that blush looked good on her.

"You're talking about the oatmeal."

"Right… so… as I said, my father was a great believer in oatmeal. He made us all eat it in the morning, even in the summer. My mother and my sister and I had to choke that shit down for him, and he expected you to finish what was in your bowl. He used to watch us eat, like we were playing golf and in danger of getting our swing wrong. I swear, he measured the angle of my spine and my hold on the spoon. At dinner he used to-" She paused. "I'm rambling."

"And I could listen to you talk for hours, so don't focus on my account."

"Yeah, well… focus is important."

"Only if you're a microscope."

She smiled a little. "Back to the oatmeal. My sister died on my birthday, on a Friday night. The funeral was put together quickly, because my father was leaving to present a paper in Canada the following Wednesday. I found out later he'd scheduled that presentation the day Hannah was found dead in her bed, no doubt because he wanted to move things along. Anyway… day of the funeral, I get up and I feel horrible. Just wretched. Nothing but nausea. Hannah… Hannah was the only real thing in a house full of nice and pretty. She was messy and loud and happy and… I loved her so much, and I couldn't bear that we were putting her in the ground. She would have hated being caged like that. Yeah… anyway, for the funeral, my mother went out and got me one of those coatdress getups in black. Trouble was, the morning of the funeral, when I went to put it on, it didn't fit. It was too small, and I felt like I couldn't breathe."

"Naturally made the stomach worse."

"Yup, but I got down to the breakfast table with only the dry heaves. Jesus, I can still remember what the two of them looked like sitting on either end, facing each other without making eye contact. Mother was like a china doll with quality-control problems-her makeup was on, her hair was in place, but everything was a little off. Her lipstick was the wrong color, she had no blush on, her chignon was showing bobbypins. Father was reading the newspaper, and the sound of those flapping pages was loud as a shotgun going off. Neither of them said a word to me.

"So I sat in my chair and couldn't stop looking at the empty seat across the table. Bowl of oatmeal comes in for a landing. Marie, our maid, laid her hand on my shoulder as she put it in front of me, and for a moment I almost broke down. But then my father snapped that paper of his like I was a puppy who'd shit on the rug, and I picked up my spoon and started eating. I forced that oatmeal down until I gagged from it. And then we went to the funeral."

V wanted to touch her, and he nearly reached out for her hand. Instead he asked, "How old were you?"

"Thirteen. Anyway, we get to the church and it's packed, because everyone in Greenwich knew my parents. My mother was being desperately gracious, and my father was all frozen stoic, so that was pretty much business as usual. I remember… yeah, I was thinking the two of them were just as they always were except for my mother's piss-poor makeup job and the fact that my father kept playing with the change in his pocket. Which was so out of character. He hated ambient noise of any kind, and I was surprised that the restless chiming of coins didn't bother him. I guess it was okay because he was in control of the sound. I mean, he could stop at any time if he wanted to."

As she paused and stared across the room, V wanted to try and get into her mind and see exactly what she was reliving. He didn't-and not because he wasn't sure it would work. The revelations she chose to share with him freely were more precious than anything he could take from her.

"Front row," she murmured. "At the church, we were seated in the front row, right in front of the altar. Closed casket, thank God, though I imagine Hannah was perfectly beautiful. She had strawberry-blond hair, my sister did. The luxurious, wavy kind that came on Barbies. Mine was stick-straight. Anyway…"

V had a passing thought that she used the word anyway like an eraser on a crowded chalkboard. She said it whenever she needed to clear off the things she'd just shared to make room for more.

"Yeah, front row. Service started. Lots of organ music… and the thing was, those pipes vibrated up through the floor. Have you ever been in a church? Probably not… Anyway, you can feel the bass of the music when it really gets rolling. Naturally, the service was in a big formal place with an organ that had more pipes than Caldwell's city sewer system. God, when that thing played, it was like you were on an airplane that was taking off."

As she stopped and took a deep breath, V knew the story was wearing her down, taking her to a place she didn't go willingly or often.

Her voice was husky as she continued. "So… we're halfway through the service and my dress is too tight and my stomach is killing me and that fucking oatmeal of my father's has sprouted vile roots and is grafting itself to the inside of my gut. And the priest comes up to the lectern to do the eulogy. He was straight out of central casting, white haired, deep voiced, dressed in ivory-and-gold robes. He was the Episcopal bishop for all of Connecticut, I think. Anyway… he gets to talking about the state of grace that awaits in heaven, and all this horseshit about God and Jesus and the Church. It seemed more like an ad for Christianity than anything to do with Hannah.

"I'm sitting there, not really tracking, when I look over and see my mother's hands. They were clasped together in her lap, totally white-knuckled… like she was on a roller-coaster ride, even though she wasn't moving. I turned to my left and looked at my father's. His palms were on his knees and all of his fingers were digging in except for the pinkie on the right, which was out for a jog. The thing was tapping against the fine wool of his slacks with a Parkinsonian tremble."

V knew where this was going. "And yours," he said softly. "What about yours?"

Jane exhaled on a little sob. "Mine… mine were utterly still, utterly relaxed. I felt nothing but that oatmeal in my stomach. Oh… God, my sister was dead and my parents, who were about as emotionless as you could get, were upset. Me? Nothing. I remember thinking Hannah would have cried if I had been lying on satin in a coffin. She would have cried for me. Me? I couldn't.

"So when the priest finished his infomercial on how great God was, and how Hannah was all lucky to be with Him and yadda, yadda, yadda, the organ lit off. The vibration of those bass pipes rose up from the floor through my seat and hit just the right frequency. Or the wrong one, I suppose. I threw up that oatmeal all over my father."

Fuck it, V thought. He reached out and took her hand. "Goddamn…"

"Yeah. So my mother stands up to take me away, but my father tells her to stay put. He walked me over to one of the church ladies, told her to take me to the bathroom, then went into the men's room. I got left alone in a stall for about ten minutes then the church lady came back, put me in her car, and drove me home. I missed the burial." She sucked in a breath. "When my parents came home, neither of them checked on me. I kept expecting one of them to come in. I could hear them moving around the house until it was all silent. Eventually, I went down, got something out of the fridge, and ate standing up at the counter, because we weren't allowed to take food upstairs. I didn't cry then either, even though it was a windy night, which always scared me, and the house was mostly dark and I felt like I'd ruined my sister's funeral."

"I'm sure you were in shock."

"Yeah. Funny… I was worried she'd be cold. You know, cold autumn night. Cold ground." Jane batted her hand around. "Anyway, next morning my father left before I got up, and he didn't come home for two weeks. He kept calling and telling my mother he was going to consult on another complex case somewhere else in the country. Meanwhile, Mother woke up every day and got dressed and took me to school, but wasn't really there. She became like a newspaper. The only things she talked about were the weather and what had gone wrong with the house or the staff while I was at school. My father came back eventually, and you know how I knew his arrival was imminent? Hannah's room. Every night I went into Hannah's room and sat with her stuff. The thing I couldn't get was how her clothes and her books and her drawings were still there, but she wasn't. It just didn't compute. Her room was like a car without an engine, everything where it should be, except all it was was potential. None of it was going to get used again.