"Whatever you say." The truth is whatever I say it is. "Look, you want me to lie for her. Let's go on from there and see if we have anything to talk about."

Susan slowly smiled in her red lipstick, pushing her black curls back from her face with one hand, her lashes very black against her white face. As if a bit ashamed of herself, but also somewhat relieved that she did not have to sell me as hard as she thought she might.

"Let's go for a drive," she said.

BEHIND the tinted windows of her Jaguar, I nestled into the smell of leather and money. It wrapped around me like fur. She had the jazz station from Long Beach on the radio, a free-form West Coast piece with a flute and an electric guitar. We rose out of Ripple Street, past the unlicensed day care and the bakery and the trompe 1'oeil of Clearwater in silence, made the left on Fletcher, left on Glendale, right onto Silverlake Boulevard, and drove around the lake for a while. Gulls bobbed on the blue-green water. The drought had exposed a huge concrete collar around the lake, but in the sealed world of the Jaguar, it was sixty-eight degrees. Such a pleasure to be in a rich woman's car. Now a new song filled the rarified atmosphere, I immediately recognized it. Oliver Nelson, "Stolen Moments."

I closed my eyes and imagined I was with Olivia and not my mother's lawyer. Her bare arms, her profile, scarf tied Kelly-style around her head and throat. That precious moment. All the more so for being unreal, gone in an instant, something to savor like perfume on the wind, piano played in a passing house in the afternoon. I hung on to it as Susan parked on the far side of the lake, where we could see the blue-green water, dotted with white, the picturesque hillside beyond. She turned the music down, but you could still hear Nelson's trumpet.

"I want you to ask yourself, what's she guilty of?" Susan asked, turning toward me from the driver's seat. "I mean, in your mind. Really. Murder, or being a lousy mother? Of not being there for you when you needed her."

I looked at the little woman, her black curls maybe one shade too black, her eyes a little mascara-smudged from the heat. The weariness was an act, but also the truth. Like so many things, the words hopelessly imprecise. I wished I had something to draw her with. She was in the process of becoming a caricature of herself. Not yet, now she was merely recognizable. But in five years, ten, she would only look like herself at a distance. Up close she would be drawn and frightened. "Honestly, aren't you just trying to punish her for being a crappy parent, and not for the alleged murder?" She cracked her window with the electric button, snapped in the car's lighter, and reached into her bag for her cigarettes. "What was Barry Kolker to you anyway, some boyfriend of your mother's. She had a number of boyfriends. You couldn't have been that attached."

"He's dead," I said. "You're accusing me of being cynical?"

She put a cigarette in her mouth and the lighter popped out. She lit it, filling the car with smoke. She exhaled up toward the slit in the window. "No, it's not Kolker. You're angry with her for abandoning you. Naturally. You've led six difficult years, and like a child, you point to the almighty mother. It's her fault. The idea that she too is a victim would never occur to you."

Out the window, in the unairconditioned part of reality, a very red-faced jogger trotted by us, dragging a tired setter on a leash. "Is that what you'll say if I tell the truth at her trial?"

We watched her plodding down the sidewalk, the dog trying to sniff at the plants as they went by. "Something like that," she said, the first honest thing I'd heard her say since I'd shaken her small hand. She sighed and flicked ash out the window. Some blew back in. She brushed it off her suit. "Astrid. She may not have been some TV mom, Barbara Billingsley with her apron and pearls, but she loves you. More than you can imagine. Right now she really needs your faith in her. You should hear her, talking about you, how she worries about you, how much she wants to be with you again."

I thought again about my imaginary trip with her, the sight of her, the magic of her speech. Now I was not so sure, maybe it was true. I wanted to ask this woman what my mother said about me. I wanted to hear her tell me what my mother thought about me, but I didn't dare leave her that opening. Bobby Fischer had taught me better than that. "She'd say anything to get out."

"Talk to her. I can set it up. Just listen to what she has to say, Astrid," Susan urged. "Six years is a long time. People do change."

My moment's uncertainty faded. I knew exactly how far Ingrid Magnussen had changed. I had her letters. I'd read them, page by page, swimming across the red tide. I knew all about her tenderness and motherly concern. Me and the white cat. But now there was something that had changed. What had changed was that for the first time in my life, my mother needed something from me, something I had the power to give or withhold, and not the other way around. I opened up the airflow vent and let the air-conditioning kiss my face.

My mother needed me. It sank in, what that meant, how incredible it was. If I went on the stand and said she did it, told about our trip to Tijuana, about the pounds of oleander and jimson weed and belladonna she'd boiled down in the kitchen, she'd never get out. And if I lied, said Barry was superparanoid, he'd developed a complex about her, he was crazy, about how she'd been so drugged when I saw her at Sybil Brand she hadn't even recognized me, she might win an appeal, get a new trial, she could be out walking around before I was twenty-one.

Reverend Thomas would not have approved of the emotion that filled me now, its sweetness was irresistible. I had her own knife to her throat. I could ask for something, I could make demands. What's in it for me, that's what I'd learned to ask, un-apologetically, in my time with Rena. What's my cut. I could put a price tag on my soul. Now I just had to figure out what I could sell it for.

"Okay," I said. "Set it up."

Susan took a last drag of her cigarette, threw it out the window, then raised the glass. Now she was all business. "Anything you want in the meantime, some spending money? "

I hated this woman. What I had been through the last six years meant nothing to her. I was simply one more brick in the structure she was erecting, I had just slipped into place. She didn't believe my mother was innocent. She only cared that there would be cameras on the courthouse steps. And her name, Susan D. Valeris, under her moving red lips. The publicity would be worth plenty.

"I'll take a couple hundred," I said.

I WALKED ALONG the river in the last afternoon light, my hands in my pockets, Baldy all pink in the east with reflected sunset, Susan's money crumpled in my fist. I strolled north, past the contractor's lot and the bakery loading bays, the sculptor's yard at the end of Clearwater Street, painted trompe 1'oeil like a little French village. A dog rushed the fence and the wide planks jerked as the animal struck it, barking and growling. Over the fence through the razor wire, shapes in bronze, balanced inside big metal hoops like Shiva, turned slowly in the wind. I found a chunk of concrete broken loose from the embankment and threw it into the river. It fell among the willows, and a flurry of whistling wings rose from cover, brown wading birds. It was happening again. I was being drawn back into her world, into her shadow, just when I was starting to feel free.