Thirty-nine

Allegra was on her stomach with one foot caught under the gate, a sock in her mouth, and her bleeding, broken nose flattened into the sand. Her ankle and wrists throbbed, but breathing was her real problem. The sand under her face was warm and wet. When she tried to inhale through her nose, she made a gurgling sound, like mucus in a bad cold. Each breath drew a trickle of blood down her throat because there was no way out of her mouth. She knew that iron taste. She was drowning in her own blood. She yanked at her foot. If she could have ripped it or bitten it off like an animal in a trap, she would have done it.

She was petrified. She could breathe through the sock and the bloody nose but only when she was calm. When panic overcame her, she made noises-stifled half sobs, inarticulate and incomprehensible. No words could escape to express her agony. Why-? What had she done to make this happen? The sock deep in her mouth triggered her gag reflex. All these years she'd wanted to die, and now she was dying and didn't want to. Not like this.

"Fucking bitch!"

She was kicking like hell and gagging on the sock when the boy swung the gate back crushing her ankle and shooting a rocket of pain up her leg. She could hear the thud of rocks thrown against the gate. A gate to nowhere. And she heard the soft voice of Maslow Atkins calling out. "Stop! Wait!"

She wasn't sure what happened. What happened to her? She'd been dozing on the bench, thinking of her mother, when suddenly she'd been startled by the voices. She smelled pot smoke. Two of them, the same two kids were back. One was crying, the other laughing. They were high, manic. Allegra knew the signs. Happysadcrazymad.

The two were in the dark, but carried the kind of flashlight that made a tiny point of illumination to shine on a keyhole or a theater program. It looked like a star bouncing along the ground. All she did was follow the star through the high wet grass, up a sloping bank, and into the bushes. She hardly knew what she was doing. She never expected to find Dr. Atkins. She'd been completely astounded to hear his voice. He was pleading. She'd never heard him beg. She didn't think. She just went to get him.

And then it happened so fast she didn't know which one of them tripped her and smashed her head against the ground, which one of them pulled her shoes off and used the laces to tie her hands behind her back. She was like a doll mangled by fighting children. They'd left her, just like that. She was a dead doll. She'd never get up again.

Allegra lifted her head to breathe, crying in the dark. "Agghhhmmmmm-"

After a while, her neck ached so badly she had to let it rest. Her head dropped and her face fell in the dirt. She tried to spit the sock out, but each time she raised her tongue her throat closed up.

"Allegra. Allegra, listen to me. Move over here. Allegra. Come on, we can help each other. Come, please."

She heard him and struggled to obey, tried to roll over; but her foot was pinned. Her hands were tied. She bucked her hips and twisted her wrists against the laces, cutting off circulation in her hands and painfully wrenching her shoulders. What was wrong with him?

Why couldn't he just move over to her? Why was he letting her suffer this way?

"Allegra-"

"Argggh." She was dying. She could feel herself dying, and a moan was the best she could do. It was exactly the way she'd felt in treatment with him, too. She'd never been able to find the right words, the open sesame words, for him to help her get out of the dungeon.

Allegra hadn't had anything to eat in three days, just some water and the coffee. She felt dizzy from the pain in her nose and the drip of blood down her throat. She was dehydrated. Something happened with electrolytes when you didn't drink enough. She'd passed out a few times from hunger when she was dieting, so usually she was pretty careful. She was beginning to hallucinate. She could hear her mother calling for her.

"Dylan, Dylan. Come home."

She imagined Dr. Atkins calling to her, too. "Allegra. Shhh. Don't cry. I'll save you."

Hours passed and her panicked moans got softer.

Forty

Grace Rodriguez came into the office at eight on the button. She was wearing a black suit and was ready for war. She walked into the office that she still shared after all these years with a young associate-this latest one a fat boyish twenty-nine-year-old who was constantly eating on the sly throughout the day whenever he thought she wasn't looking, though how he thought she'd fail to notice when she was only a few feet away in a very small room she couldn't begin to imagine.

This morning Craig Hewlett's space was utterly crumbless, so it was clear he hadn't arrived yet. Grace's heart pounded as she put her purse in the top drawer of her desk and purposefully started the long trek around the building to her boss's office. Even though it was the worst day of Jerry Atkins's life, she was going to have it out with him anyway.

The prosperous accounting firm of Haight-Atkins was contained on one whole floor of a large Third Avenue office building. The walls were a mind-numbing pewter throughout. The floors were covered with industrial-quality ashen carpeting that was shampooed only once a year in the spring. Grace's own space had no amenities, not even a chair for visitors. Jerry's office, where the clients went for their meetings, had to be luxurious, however. His furniture was cherry wood, the chairs and sofas were cushy, the colors turquoise and rose like those used in resorts in the Caribbean. This disparity in their stations, however, did not always rankle Grace.

Usually her self-awareness didn't extend to hurt and bitter, and when she was troubled, she would hide behind cheerful, reassuring smiles like malignant cells sometimes hid in otherwise benign tumors. Her life was carefully structured to shield her from hurt; she thought she was above it, able to roll with whatever punches came her way. But today her daughter was missing.

Historically, Grace was alone with Dylan on Wednesday, Thursday, and Saturday nights. And for many years they had been joyful evenings. In recent years, however, her times with Dylan had become ever more painful and difficult. Dylan was twenty years old and still living at home, doing her own thing, coming and going just as she pleased. But she'd become rude and disrespectful, uncommunicative. Grace went over the list of her grievances. In addition, she looked as if she didn't eat anything. She'd promise to come home for dinner, and then didn't come home. When she did come home, she played with her food but didn't swallow very much. Since the summer her bad behaviors had escalated, and last night Dylan hadn't come home at all.

To get to Jerry's office on the outermost tier of the building, Grace had to come out from an inside bank of offices where she worked in a cubicle, then travel all the way around the building on the hallway where privileged partners had offices with big windows and views of the East River and Queens, or the great Manhattan skyline north and south, or Third Avenue looking west. When Grace reached the place where she could see actual natural light shining in from the windows of offices whose doors were open, she felt like a rat coming out of a maze.

She could hardly breathe, her heart pounded with such anger at the mess she and her daughter had become. In the last few months during spring and summer Dylan started acting really weird. Grace had done some soul-searching as she wrestled with herself over what to do about it.

All she'd wanted was a child, a baby girl to love as her mother hadn't loved her. On her walk around the building, she went over her story in her mind. She'd had her baby, and for a long time she'd thought Dylan was enough. When Dylan was a little girl, Grace had enjoyed every minute they were alone. They'd made cookies and played house, done puzzles, learned the ABC's, then math, then social studies, then whatever. She'd thought it was pure joy to have a child. When she was very little, Dylan had spent her days with a nice grandmotherly type who lived in the building. When she was two, Grace took her to all-day school programs. She went to a nearby public school. By middle school Dylan was independent, was coming home on her own, did her homework, and waited patiently for her mom to come home. A good girl.