"So?" Rena said. "Is she getting out?"

"No," I said.

Driving up from San Miguel de Allende in his toy-sized Citroen car, his shirt very white against his copper skin. Was she admitting she made a mistake? If only she could admit it. Confess. I might lie for her then, talk to her lawyer, take the stand and swear beyond a shadow of a doubt that she never. Perhaps this was as close as she would get to admitting a thing. I wished we had stayed in Guanajuato too.

THEN NIKI moved out. She was joining a Toronto band, it was one of Werner's. "Come with me," she said as she loaded her pickup. I handed her a suitcase, zebra-striped. We both smiled, checked each other for tears. She left me some addresses and phone numbers, but I knew I wouldn't be using them. I had to face this, that people left and you didn't see them again.

Within a week, Rena moved two new girls into Niki's room, Shana and Raquel, twelve and fourteen. Shana had epilepsy, and Raquel couldn't read, it was her second time in seventh grade. More broken children for Rena Grushenka's discount salvage yard.

SEPTEMBER came with its skirts of fire. Fire up on the Angeles Crest. Fire in Malibu, Altadena. Fire all along the San Gabriels, in the San Gorgonio wilderness, fire was a flaming hoop the city would have to jump through to reach the blues of October. In Frogtown, we had three shootings in one week — a holdup at the ARCO station, a lost motorist caught on a dead-end street in a Van Gogh midnight, a woman shot by her out-of-work electrician husband during a domestic dispute.

It was in the furnace of oleander time that Susan finally called. "I had a trial," she explained. "But we're back on track. I've scheduled you a visit, day after tomorrow."

I was tempted to balk, tell her I wasn't available, make things difficult, but in the end I agreed. I was as ready as I would ever be.

So on a morning already surrendered to the scourging wind and punishing heat, Camille Barren, Susan's assistant, came for me, and we took the long drive out to Corona. In the visitors yard, we sat at an orange picnic table under the shade structure, drinking cold cans of soda from the pop machine, wiping them across our foreheads, pressing them to our cheeks. Waiting for my mother. Sweat dripped between my breasts, down my back. Camille looked wilted but stoic in her beige sheath, her fashionable short haircut limp and sweaty around the edges. She didn't bother to talk to me, she was only the errand girl. "Here she comes," Camille said.

My mother waited for the CO to unlock the gate. She still looked wonderful, thin and wiry, her pale hair twisted up in the back with a pencil stuck in it. A year and a half. I stood up. She walked over to us, warily, squinting in the sun, wisps of her hair blowing in the wind like smoke. Her tanned skin was more lined since I'd seen her last. She was getting that leathery look, like a white settler in Kenya. But she hadn't changed as much as I had. She stopped when she got under the overhang, and I didn't move, I wanted her to see who I was now. My acid green shirt with the industrial zipper, my eyes ringed in heavy black shadow and liner, my ears with their octave of earrings. My woman's legs in a swap meet skirt, that Sergei loved to put over his shoulders, my hips, my full breasts. High wedgie shoes borrowed from Rena for the occasion. Not the pink girl with the prom shoes, not the rich orphan. I was Rena's girl now. I could pass for any girl heading to just where my mother was. But not the soft girl, the check kiter. She would not take anything from me. Not anymore. For the first time when I visited, she didn't smile. I could see shock on her face, and I was glad of it. Her lawyer's assistant looked between the two of us, uninterested, then got up and went inside the cooler concrete of the visitors shelter, leaving us alone.

My mother reached out and took my hand. I let her. "When I get out, I'll make it up to you," she said. "Even in two or three years, you'll still need a mother, won't you?"

She was holding my hand, she was a foot away from me. I stared at her. It was as if some alien was speaking through her. What kind of a routine was this?

"Who said you're getting out?" I said.

My mother dropped my hand, stepped back a pace. The look in her eyes faded the aquamarine to robin's egg.

"I just said I'd talk to you. I didn't say I'd do it. I've got a deal to make."

Now robin's egg turned to ash.

"What deal?" she asked, leaning against a post, her arms folded across the front of her denim dress, the very same dress she wore when I saw her last, now two shades lighter blue.

"A trade," I said. "Do you want to sit here or under the trees?"

She turned and led me to her favorite place in the visitors yard, under the white-trunked ficus trees looking out at the road, her back to Reception, the farthest point from the first lookout tower. We sat on the dry, summer-battered grass, it scored my bare legs.

She sat gracefully, her legs to one side, like a girl in a meadow. I was larger than her now, but not as graceful, not beautiful, but present, solid as a hunk of marble before it's been carved. I let her watch me in profile. I couldn't look at her while I spoke. I was not hard enough, I knew I would be thrown by her bitter surprise.

"Here's the deal," I said. "There are certain things I want to know. You tell me, and I'll do what you want me to do."

My mother picked one of the dandelions out of the grass, blew the tufts from the head. "Or what."

"Or I tell the truth and you can rot in here till you die," I said.

I heard the grass rustle as she changed her position. When I looked, she was lying on her back, examining the stem from which the plumes had been blown. "Susan can discredit your testimony any number of ways."

"You need me," I said. "You know it. Whatever she says."

"I hate this look, by the way," she said. "You're a Sunset Boulevard motel, a fifteen-dollar blow job in a parked car."

"I can look however you want," I said. "I'll wear kneesocks if you like." She was twirling the dandelion between her palms. "I'm the one who can tell them it was Barry's paranoid fixation. That he hounded you. I can say he had threatened to commit suicide, fake it to look like you did it, to punish you for leaving him." Her blurred features behind the chicken-wire glass. "I'm the one who knows how fucked up you were at Sybil Brand. When I came to see you that day, you didn't even recognize me." It still made me sick to think of it.

"If I submit to this examination." She flicked the dandelion stem away.

"Yes."

She kicked off her two-hole tennis shoes and ran her feet through the grass. She stretched her legs out in front of her and propped herself on her elbows, like she was at the beach. She gazed at her feet, tapping them together at the ball. "You used to have a certain delicacy about you. A transparency. You've become heavy, opaque."