Right then, I found it hard to imagine how much worse circumstances could get. I hated these unspoken tensions between Rachel and me. I loved her, and I needed her, but I was angry too. The burden of blame slipped too easily onto my shoulders these days. I was tired of carrying it.

“Doing much work?” asked Walter, changing the subject.

“Some,” I said.

“Anything interesting?”

“I don’t think so. You never can tell, but I’ve tried to be selective. It’s pretty straightforward stuff. I’ve been offered more…complicated matters, but I’ve turned them down. I won’t bring harm upon them, but…”

I stopped. Walter waited.

“Go on.”

I shook my head. Lee, Walter’s wife, entered the kitchen. She scowled as she saw him drinking from the bottle.

“I turn my back for five minutes, and you abandon all civilized behavior,” she said, but she was smiling as she spoke. “You’ll be drinking out of the toilet bowl next.”

Walter hugged her to him.

“You know,” she said, “they named the dog after you. Maybe that’s why. Anyway, lots of people want to meet you because of it. The dog wants to meet you.”

Walter scowled as she grabbed him by the hand and pulled him toward the garden.

“Are you coming outside?” she asked me.

“In a moment,” I said.

I watched them cross the lawn. Rachel waved to them, and they went to join her. Her eyes met mine, and she gave me a small smile. I raised my hand, then touched it to the glass, my fingers dwarfing her face.

I won’t bring harm upon you and our daughter, not by my choosing, yet still it comes. That’s what I’m afraid of. It has found me before, and it will find me again. I am a danger to you, and to our child, and I think you know that.

We are coming apart.

I love you, but we are coming apart.

The day drew on. People left, and others, who were unable to make the ceremony, took their places. As the light faded, Angel and Louis were no longer speaking, and were more obviously maintaining their distance from all that was taking place around them than before. Both kept their eyes fixed on the road that wound from Route 1 to the coast. Between them lay a cell phone. Arno had called them earlier that day, as soon as he had seen the woman safely onto the Greyhound bus from New York.

“She didn’t leave a name,” he told Louis, his voice crackling slightly over the connection.

“I know who she is,” said Louis. “You did right to call.”

Now there were lights on the road. I joined them where they sat, leaning slightly on the back of the bench. Together we watched the cab cross the bridge over the marsh, the sunlight gleaming on the waters, the car’s progress reflected in their depths. There was a tugging at my stomach, and my head felt as though hands were pressed hard against my temples. I could see Rachel standing unmoving among the guests. She too was watching the approaching car. Louis rose as it turned into the driveway of the house.

“This isn’t about you,” he said. “You got no reason to be concerned.”

And I wondered at what he had brought to my house.

I followed them through the open gate at the end of the yard. Angel stayed back as Louis walked to the cab and opened the door. A woman emerged, a large, multicolored bag clasped in her hands. She was smaller than Louis by perhaps eighteen inches, and probably no more than a decade or so older than he, although her face bore the marks of a difficult life, and she wore her worries like a veil across her features. I imagined that she had been beautiful when she was younger. There was little of that physical beauty left now, but there was an inner strength to her that shone brightly from her eyes. I could see some bruising to her face. It looked very recent.

She stood close to Louis and gazed up at him with something almost like love, then slapped him hard across the left cheek with her right hand.

“She’s gone,” she said. “You were supposed to look out for her, but now she’s gone.”

And she began to cry as he took her in his arms, and his body shook with the force of her sobs.

This is the story of Alice, who fell down a rabbit hole and never came back.

Martha was Louis’s aunt. A man named Deeber, now dead, had fathered a child upon her, a girl. They called her Alice, and they loved her, but she was never a happy child. She rebelled against the company of women and turned instead to men. They told her that she was beautiful, for she was, but she was young and angry. Something gnawed deep inside her, its hunger exacerbated by the actions of the women who had loved her and cared for her. They had told her that her father was dead, but it was only through others that she learned of the kind of man he was, and the manner in which he had left this world. Nobody knew who was responsible for his death, but there were rumors, hints that the neatly dressed black women in the house with the pretty garden had colluded in his killing along with her cousin, the boy called Louis.

Alice rebelled against them and all that they represented: love, security, the bonds of family. She was drawn to a bad crowd, and left the safety of her mother’s home. She drank, smoked some dope, became a casual user of harder drugs, then an addict. She drifted from the places that she knew, and went to live in a tin-roofed shack at the edge of a dark forest, where men paid to take turns with her. She was paid in narcotics, although their value was far less than what the johns had paid to sleep with her, and so the bonds around her tightened. Slowly she began to lose herself, the combination of sex and drugs acting like a cancer, eating away at all that she truly was, so that she became at last their creature even as she tried to convince herself that this was only a temporary aberration, a fleeting thing to help her deal with the sense of hurt and betrayal that she felt.

It was early one Sunday morning, and she was lying on a bare cot, naked but for a pair of cheap plastic shoes. She stank of men, and the hunger was upon her. Her head hurt, and the bones in her arms and legs ached. Two other women slept nearby, the doorways to their quarters blocked by blankets hung over ropes. A small window allowed the morning light to seep into her room, sullied by the dirt upon its pane and the cobwebs, freckled with leaves and dead bugs, that hung at its corners. She pulled the blanket aside, and saw that the door of the hut was open. Lowe stood in its frame, his giant shoulders almost brushing either side of the doorway. He was shirtless, his feet bare, and sweat glistened upon his shaved head and trickled slowly down between his shoulder blades. His back was pale and hairy. He had a cigarette in his right hand, and was talking to another man, who stood outside. Alice figured it was Wallace, the little “high yellow” man who ran his hookers and his small-time narcotics trade from out of this hut in the woods, with a little illicit whiskey for those of more conservative tastes. A laugh came, and then she saw Wallace as he moved across the large window at the front of the hut, zipping up his fly and rubbing his fingers upon his jeans. His shirt was open and hung loose upon his pigeon chest and his little belly. He was an ugly man, and rarely bathed. Sometimes he asked her to do things for him, and it was all that she could manage not to choke on the taste of him. But she needed him now. She needed what he had, even if it meant adding to her debt, a debt that would never be paid.

She put on a T-shirt and skirt to cover her nakedness, then lit a cigarette and prepared to pull the blanket fully across. Sundays were quiet. Some of the men who used this place would already be preparing for church, and they would sit in the pews and pretend to listen to the sermon, even as they thought of her. There were others who had not darkened a church door in many years, but even for them Sundays were different. If she could work up the energy, she might go to the mall, pick up some new clothes with the little money that she had, maybe some cosmetics too. She had been meaning to do it for a couple of weeks, but there were other distractions here. Still, even Wallace had recently commented on the state of her dresses and her underwear, although the men who came here weren’t too particular. Some even liked the squalor of it, for it added a certain spice to their sense of transgression, but Wallace generally preferred to pretend that his women were clean even if their surroundings were not. If she went out early, she could get her business done, then come back and relax for the afternoon. There might be some work for her in the evening, but it would not be as demanding as the night before, not by any means. Fridays and Saturdays were always the worst, with the threat of alcohol-fueled violence ever present. True, Lowe and Wallace protected the women, but they couldn’t stay with them behind that curtain while the men were being serviced, and it didn’t take more than a split second for a man’s fist to reach a woman’s face.