eyes and caramel skin turned heads (while Maddy, slightly famous, was edging toward invisible). Her enchanting smile, like aromatherapy, made people around her happier in their skin. “Uncle Nick dance?” Laila pursed her pillowy lips. “No way.”
“Honey, he’s not such a stiff.”
Laila loved Nick—now that her loyal heart had forgiven him for displacing Marshall. She was comically protective, coaching Nick, a WASP relic, in modern folkways. Last summer she’d gone to Nicaragua to help build a school—in a village menaced by cholera—and returned to the States with a calling: to photograph the Third World’s poor in the manner of Sebastião Salgado. This summer she was headed for Juárez with a photojournalist to document the fallout from global capitalism. The child had been born with a social conscience the way she herself had with perfect pitch. . . .
Maddy sank into her wing chair; four A.M. Europe time, and she was caffeinated with fatigue. Her eye wandered over a weekly lying open on the coffee table. She made out the byline Jed Oliver. Tenants’ lawyer, unlikely mix of social climber and wolfman—and her daughter’s fortyish boyfriend. Laila had started late, clinging longer than quite normal to Babar the elephant king and a battered picture book of Greek myths, dreaming and playing solitary games among the gardens and crumbling statuary encrusted with lichen at Conscience Point.
“Lo, something I wanna talk to you about.”
“Oh, brother.” Laila slid down on her neck, legs akimbo, caramel knees poking through her jeans. How had this child gotten so thin?
“Of course we all admire Jed Oliver for the cases he takes on, but isn’t he a little—”
“Old for me.” Laila always a beat ahead. “Like who gives a shit?”
Maddy startled. Laila never took this pit-bull tack; she was more Ferdinand, dodging the picadors to sniff the flowers. Maddy heard her friend Sophie: If a guy’s white, employed, and dates psychiatric social workers, he thinks he’s exempt from AIDS, so why spoil the moment fumbling for a Trojan. “Uh, y’know, Jed’s run through an awful lot of women,” she said.
“Ma. No one does unprotected sex anymore.” In case Maddy doubted the existence of telepathy. “Look, he’s just a guy I hang with, I’m almost nineteen, I know what I’m doing. Give it a rest.”
That un-Laila harshness again. “Lo-ey, it’s just . . . I don’t want you to associate love with unhappiness.”
Laila’s gaze turned inward like a child’s beneath her straight black lashes. As when she’d first learned about body bags, when Maddy had taken her—mistakenly; unforgivably—to All That Jazz. Peeling off the couch, Laila loped to the mantel and scowled at the photos in ornate silver frames: herself smiling gap-toothed from a rowboat in Central Park; standing with Nick, suited up and beaming from the dazzled slopes of Bromley—scenes of ordinary family happiness. Though Laila’s passage into Maddy’s safekeeping had been anything but ordinary. The official story: Maddy had adopted her from a foundling home in Rabat, Morocco, a star child in a carton grasping a silver rattle—a story about as credible as Babar.
Laila toed the copper fire fan with her black hightop. “Mom, there’s something I gotta tell you.”
“Oh, brother.” Echoing Laila as a joke, yet her throat tightened.
“The thing with Jed—it’s just not where I’m at anymore.” A little huff of exasperation, an Ashcroft tic. “I’ve decided to leave college for a while and go work in Guatemala.”
Maddy pitched forward in her chair. “Drop out?”
“Arghh”—Laila favored comic-book expletives. “No, take time out. Anyway, your view of Brown is totally unreal. Kids are like, Hello, who’s Beowulf? They fly the Concorde to Paris, they do lines in the dorm. And there’s this new course, a workshop on sex toys—”
“Surely you can find some worthwhile courses. Tara Gerson took time out from Yale and ended up in Oregon in a lesbian commune.”
“So? I cannot stand your homophobia.”
Maddy felt she’d wandered into someone else’s movie. Laila usually caressing and wise, with greater tact than the nominal grownups. She was nice even to telemarketers! You two are like sisters, people would say, not altogether approving. Yet recently, Maddy now recognized—her thinking slowed by fatigue—Laila had turned moody and irritable; she sometimes lashed out in anger at the least provocation. Since . . . before the vacation in France?
“Guatemala’s a dangerous place,” Maddy continued, skipping over eggshells. “Those coeds hijacked and raped. The nuns murdered in El Salvador.” Thanks to her daughter, she’d become an expert on mayhem south of the border.
“Third World violence comes out of the policies of the companies you and Nick invest in—they bleed Latin America dry. And lookit what’s going down right here. Building owners, like your buddy Amos Grubb, are fucking over the maintenance workers who’ve gone on strike, bringing in younger workers they can pay less. Someday they’re gonna raze the mansions on Midas Lane.”
Oh, brother. She shut her eyes and shook her head. Not at Laila’s outburst, which rather impressed her—she sensed it was camouflage. But for what?
“You don’t give me credit for being an adult,” Laila went on in a nicer voice. “I’m gonna work in a construction project in Lagunas, a village in San Marcos. And I’ve applied for a USIA grant to photograph the indigenous peoples for a show.”
Struggling for calm: “But why not finish college first—”
“Arghh, why must you boss everyone’s life?”
Sighing, Maddy rose, catching her image, haggard but svelte, in the night bay window. Well, the mother-daughter thing was famously toxic; she’d heard her friends griping about the resident bitch on wheels; she’d just been lucky till now. Suddenly she wondered if Nick found her bossy, too. And was she obnoxiously overscheduled, like those women who, Sophie joked, penciled in orgasms?
“You gotta trust me, I know what I’m doing,” Laila said enigmatically. Then her pale eyes glittered and she was close beside Maddy, hugging her, yet Maddy hung back, hands against Laila’s scary ribs. “I love you,” Laila said.
She felt this taut little body. Laila once smelled of unfinished wood from her bunk bed; now she smelled womanly and complicated. Okay, probably Laila had never forgiven her for Nick—that’s what was going on; with Marshall, Laila knew who came first. No matter that she’d bought her the Nikon F5 and created the darkroom on the third floor—Laila felt bought off. You did your best, and it wasn’t good enough. That seemed to be the deal.
She pulled Laila onto the window seat beside her. “Lou, let’s go away for a week, just the two of us. In September, for your birthday.” She’d shave some days off the trip to Ireland, even if Nick already groused it was too short. “We could go hiking in the Rockies. Remember that climb to Cathedral and coming down for lunch at the Pine Creek Cookhouse? I’ve never been so happy.” A girl’s happiness, gamboling and free, needing no tending like adult passion.
Laila flashed her lovely smile. “Remember those dogues?”—one of their invented words, which also included goofy love-names. “The ones wearing backpacks?”
“And the llamas? And the way the breeze flicks the silver underside of the aspens?”
Laila’s eyes clouded; she shifted away. “At this resort in the Caribbean they give the guests a choice of nine friggin’ pillows. And in Juárez the pepenadores forage for food in dumps and compete with dogs.”
That she could follow Laila’s logic didn’t help. Their connection crackled like a wire ready to short out. “So you won’t ever go anywhere nice?”
“I’ll go where I’m needed. I can have my goddamn birthday at the Point.” She jumped up, eyes darting around the