Georgia ’s look tells me this is not a time for political correctness. “Yeah, I guess so.”

Heidi’s sudsy hand touches my face. She looks sorry for me.

I take the brush, begin scrubbing my own arm. “Dang,” I tell her. “I don’t think it comes off.”

She says, “Wait,” and pulls herself again over the lip of the sink, stretches to grab a soap bar, then squirts the liquid soap over it and hands it to me. She says, “Two soaps.” I wash my arm like crazy, then rinse. We both stare at my arm. “Nope,” I say, “what else can we try?” Georgia backs away, and for the next few minutes Heidi and I try every kind of brush-soap combination she can imagine, including turning the water in the basin cold.

Finally I say, “Know what?”

“What?”

“I think we’re stuck with it.”

Heidi takes a long last look at my arm, then walks me to the hand towel hanging from the refrigerator handle. I dry my arm and she does the same.

My forearm is red and raw on the spot where we’ve been performing our ethnic cleansing experiment. I say, “Know what else?”

“What?”

“If we keep this up, we could hurt ourselves.”

Minutes later, Heidi on my shoulders, I two-step around the living room to a Bob Marley CD I have convinced her is the hottest thing since Barney. There is nothing of the rage and desperation of the last two hours in her eyes, but I’m aware of Georgia ’s continuous assertion that the only pure evil is nothing. For this moment, high atop my shoulders, Heidi squeals, visible and proud. But I know she’ll come crashing down the moment she is degraded again. I know-just because I know-that despair moves in like a flash flood when she is diminished. It isn’t even about race, really. It’s about nothingness.

Georgia emerges from her office with a form and a pen, lifts Heidi off my shoulders, hands me the form, and says, “Sign this.”

“What is it?”

“A confidentiality oath.”

“What?”

“It’s a signed statement that you won’t tell anyone anything that goes on here in therapy,” she says. “So I can have you work with Heidi, or any other kid who needs you when you’re around.”

“You’re hiring me?”

She laughs. “For far under minimum wage. I’m keeping my license safe, baby.”

I glance at the written oath, dated two weeks ago. “This is old.”

“Predated,” she says back. “Sign it before Heidi’s mother gets here. She’s already seen you with her.”

I don’t get it.

“Didn’t I see Alicia in the hall when you threw the doll out?”

“Alicia Marshall!” Click! I look at Heidi. “Alicia Marshall’s your mom?”

She looks away.

“This is Rich Marshall’s kid? He did this?”

“Watch your tone,” Georgia says. “You’re a professional.”

I start to answer, but Georgia glances at Heidi and quickly back at me with a look that says later.

I disappear into the kitchen when Alicia returns, after which Georgia extracts two of the finest homemade oatmeal cookies currently in production from her cookie jar. “Here,” she says, “You deserve these.”

“I’m getting paid in cookies?”

“Get used to it.”

“Jesus, I knew Alicia had a mixed-race kid, but it didn’t even occur to me that was her.”

“You know a lot of mixed-race kids in this town? Guess I better bring you up to speed, darlin’.”

I know part of this story already, but now Georgia fills me in on the rest. When he graduated from high school against all odds, notorious deer-slayer Rich Marshall went to work in the woods setting chokers for his dad’s logging company, passing up the chance to play football at the local community college long enough to bring his grades up to an even 0.00 so he could attend an NCAA Division I school. His girlfriend, Alicia Dalton, signed up at the beauticians’ school at Spokane River Community College, dumped Rich, began dating a black defensive back named Willis Stack, and got pregnant.

I won’t go into the white supremist militia dogma Rich began spouting in response to “this interracial travesty in our midst,” but Alicia was in love, and she and Willis decided to get married. Then Willis was paralyzed from the neck down as a result of a crushing hit he laid on a wide receiver from Wenatchee. The story goes he couldn’t bear to think of raising his kid in that condition or of saddling Alicia with his care, so in the middle of the night, about three weeks after he was released from the hospital, his brothers loaded him into their van and spirited him away, leaving Alicia heartbroken and lost. She dropped out of school, had the baby-which she named after Willis’s sister Felicia-and went to work as a checker at Jensen Brothers Foods, where good old Rich shopped for his frozen TV dinners and Cheetos and Budweiser and started courting her again, every bit as pissed off as he was the day she started dating Willis.

In her defeated state, Alicia believed Rich when he said nobody would have her “nigger baby” but him, and they entered into wedded bliss, legally changed Felicia’s name to Heidi because it was the “whitest” name Rich could think of, became parents to twin boys nine months to the day from the wedding, and settled into a life of what Alicia described to Georgia as hell on earth. That gives hell and earth a bad rap in my book. Heidi was not allowed to touch food other family members might eat, or play with her younger brothers’ toys except on special occasions, which occurred when Rich said they occurred, or when he was out of town or passed out on the couch. This guy was every girl’s parents’ nightmare, a control freak with an I.Q. three points lower than his belt size.

Child Protection Services got involved through an anonymous report when Rich decided Heidi had earned twenty-five “spanks” with his belt-ten for forgetting to clean her room, five for dropping her dessert on the floor after he’d told her to be careful, and ten for not washing out the dog’s bowl-and demanded that Alicia deliver the blows to his specifications. When Alicia turned out not to have the heart for it, Rich took over and Heidi was black and blue from the middle of her back to her knees. Rich’s parents got him an attorney who was able to plea-bargain him down from an assault charge, and the kids were placed out of the home until Rich learned to manage his rage and meanness and Alicia learned to protect them from his rage and meanness.

Now this is where I don’t get it about males and females in so-called civilized America. Alicia Marshall is a good-looking woman, and she’s smart enough that she sure didn’t have to settle for whatever emerged from the nearest manhole. She told Georgia she loved Willis Stack, and Georgia says it’s clear she loves Heidi. What could be inside a person that could allow an asshole like Rich Marshall to come along and take her kid apart? Georgia says it’s what isn’t inside a person.

At any rate, they both started into mental-health treatment, but Rich blew out of it in the first week. Anger management group and parenting classes got in the way of his drinking beer, a problem he solved by giving up the classes. Alicia got the kids back with the promise that she would stay in treatment and would never see Rich in their presence. That was perfect for Rich because he didn’t like the kids all that much anyway, and he could see her often enough to make sure she knew she’d never learn to live without him. In my view, learning to live without Rich Marshall is like learning to live without cholera, but nobody asked me.

As I walk toward my car from Georgia’s house, what I know is this: The feeling I had inside when Heidi and I were scrubbing ourselves “clean” will keep Rich Marshall in my life long after I would normally have had him surgically removed like a giant hemorrhoid. No way can I turn away from Heidi now; her sorrow for my color has to be repaired. I’m big enough-old enough-to stop guys like Rich, but Heidi’s not. Georgia’s right about bigotry: that absent the element of hate, a person’s skin color is only an indication of his or her geographical ancestry. But with that element, it is a soul stealer.