The whole thing was an accident. He’d gotten the tickets for South Pacific as my mother’s birthday present. For weeks, she’d gone around playing the cast recording, singing “Younger than Springtime,” making appointments for a haircut and color, trying on and returning different dresses. I had come home on the Friday afternoon of their proposed trip and found her sick in bed. Some kind of twenty-four-hour bug, I’d thought, remembering the sounds of retching, murmuring behind closed doors, my dad asking if she wanted a doctor and my mother, shrill and weepy, saying she’d be fine, just fine, she just needed to sleep. My father had emerged tight-lipped, visibly unhappy. He’d already paid for the tickets, made plans for dinner, reserved the hotel room. If there’d been time he would have found a way to cancel the whole thing. Instead, he’d mustered up a smile and said, “How’d you like to go to the Big Apple with your dear old dad?”

At twelve, I was not looking good. My breasts and my nose had both sprouted to what would become their adult dimensions, with the rest of my body and my face lagging behind. I had braces, with rubber bands to pull my upper jaw back into alignment with my lower jaw, and my oily skin, in spite of all the Clearasil and the benzoyl-peroxide-soaked scrubbie pads, was routinely spattered with pimples. I was wearing my hair with bangs, figuring the more of my troubled complexion I could hide, the better, and my oversized button-down shirts, paired with pants pegged at the ankles and flowy everywhere else, did nothing to minimize my size. But on that night, due to some miracle of luck and timing, my skin was clear, my hair was behaving, and I looked like a girl any father would be happy to escort to a show.

“Try my silver dress,” my mother had croaked from her bed. It was meant to be knee-length. On me, it was a hip-skimming tunic. Paired with plain black leggings and my mom’s black leather boots, it made me look almost like a grown-up, sophisticated and smart. She swept my bangs back with one of the wide cotton bands she wore to yoga, then blow-dried and straightened my hair and let me wear a little lipstick, red, which made my skin look olive instead of sallow. “Nice,” she whispered with a smile, before turning on her side and falling noisily asleep. My father had been dressed in his newest suit and the tie my mom had gotten him for his birthday. His eyes widened in appreciation as I came down the stairs, with my mother’s good black winter coat draped over one arm. “Those boys don’t know what they’re missing,” he’d blurted, and then instantly looked ashamed, but I carried that compliment close, like a jeweled locket, something wonderful and rare. He had held the car door open for me, regaled me with stories of the brain-dead interns from Penn’s and Temple’s graduate schools who descended on his office every summer, and how one of them had gotten so drunk at the managing partner’s Fourth of July party that he’d vomited in the hot tub. Exiting the car, paying the parking-lot attendant, holding his arm out to hail a taxi, or holding a door open and saying “After you,” he’d looked so handsome, tall and assured in his camel-hair topcoat, his shoes polished to a high gloss, the Rolex my mother had bought him for his fiftieth birthday gleaming on his wrist. In the theater, he kept one hand lightly between my shoulder blades as he steered us toward our seats, and in the restaurant, the pride in his tone was unmistakable as he introduced me to the maître d’ and the waiter, who both seemed to know him, as “my daughter, Allison.”

I could remember everything from that night—the look of the theater, lit like a temple in the frosty Manhattan night, the smell of perfume and silk and fur in the air, the rustle of programs as the audience settled into the seats, the plaintive voice of the lead actor, lamenting about how paradise had once nearly been his. I remembered how women’s eyes had turned toward my father, the approving looks they gave him, how I’d felt about the way he belonged in their company, tall and smart and successful. I could name everything we’d eaten at the little French bistro on Fifty-Sixth Street, and could conjure up the taste of lobster bisque laced with sherry, profiteroles drizzled in dark chocolate, the single sip each of white wine and red wine and after-dinner port he’d let me have. Half-asleep in the taxi’s backseat as it cut through the traffic, humming the overture to myself, I had thought that I would never feel more content, more beloved, more beautiful.

Today is MONDAY, read the sign in the dining room, where tables for four were draped in pink cloths and set at wide intervals, the better to steer wheelchairs around them. On a shelf were dozens of paperbacks by Lee Child, Vince Flynn, Brad Thor. Was there some kind of law that men who wrote military thrillers had to have two-syllable names where the first and the last sounded interchangeable? There were romances for the ladies—your Nora Roberts, your Danielle Steel—and board games in worn boxes, some with their sagging edges reinforced with duct tape, the same games I played with Ellie: Sorry! and Parcheesi and Monopoly and Battleship. Our next meal will be DINNER, read the whiteboard at the front of the room. Tonight we are having CREAM OF MUSHROOM SOUP, LONDON BROIL, MASHED POTATOES, and GREEN BEANS. Oh, Dad, I mourned, and wondered how my mother would survive, seeing her beloved husband in a place like this.

Kathleen interrupted my reverie, giving me a glossy “Welcome to Eastwood” folder and a big smile. “If you’re ready, we can go back to my office. There’s some preliminary paperwork you can fill out, and then, once our finance department has had a look, they’ll be in touch. Did you bring your father’s tax returns?”

“I’m sorry,” I said. The insides of my eyelids were stinging, and I was already blinking back tears. “I think I’m going to have to take care of that another time.”

“Are you all right?” Kathleen’s tone was not unsympathetic. She must have seen this dozens, if not hundreds of times—spouses and children who thought they were ready flipping out and running when it came time to sign the forms, to write the checks, to make it real. I managed a nod, and then hurried past the front desk, through the doors, out to the parking lot, and into my car. One dream in my heart, I heard in my head, and brushed my sleeve against my cheeks to wipe away the tears. One love to be living for . . .. One love to be living for . . .. This nearly was mine.

EIGHT

“Allison Weiss?” The girl waiting at the door was tiny, with a nose the size of a pencil eraser and feet so small I bet she had to shop in the children’s department. It was May, the weather springtime-perfect. The scents of flowers, cut grass, and freshly turned earth wafted on a warm breeze (I could see a gardener digging the beds adjacent to the parking lot), and the sky outside the television studio was a perfect turquoise, dotted with cotton-ball clouds.

I smiled at the young woman with the warmth and goodwill that only the pure of heart, or the people who’ve recently swallowed a handful of OxyContin, can muster. “I’m Allison Weiss. Are you Beatrice?” I had gotten the call the night before, from a woman who’d introduced herself as Kim Caster, a producer for The News on Nine, the local evening newscast. “Did you hear about that mess in Akron?” she had asked.

“I did.” The mess in Akron was the kind of story that had become depressingly familiar since every teenager in America, it seemed, had been issued an iPhone. On a fine spring weekend, a fifteen-year-old girl had gone to a party. She’d gotten drunk. Four different boys, all football teammates, had taken advantage of her. Then, just to add to the fun, they’d posted photographs of their deeds on Instagram and video on YouTube. Within the next twenty-four hours, almost every kid who attended the town’s high school saw what had happened. The girl had tried to kill herself after a few of the most lurid shots ended up on her Facebook page. The boys had been arrested . . . but their defenders spread the word that the girl had come dressed provocatively with a vibrator in her purse and had texted her friends that she was looking for action.

“As someone who writes a lot about sex and relationships—and, of course, as a mother yourself—what are your thoughts?”

“I don’t think owning a vibrator, or even having one with you, is a standing invitation for guys to do whatever they want,” I’d said. “A girl can wear a short skirt and not be asking for it. She can even get drunk and have the right not to be raped. It’s never the victim’s fault.”

“Mmm-hmm . . . uh-huh . . . great . . . great,” said the producer. “And what about the argument that it wasn’t really a gang rape because some of it involved only digital penetration?”

I’d rolled my eyes. A columnist at no less an institution than the Washington Post had made that very point on the op-ed page last week, and the Examiner had reprinted his column. In our better days, I might have given Dave some grief about it, but these days Dave and I were barely speaking. It felt as if we were trapped in the world’s longest staring contest, neither of us willing to blink and bring up the topic of L. McIntyre, or Dave’s ever-lengthening stay in the guest room, or the pills. “There’s no ‘only’ when it comes to rape,” I said. “I don’t think it matters whether it’s a penis or a finger. Anything you don’t want inside you shouldn’t be there.”

The producer had seemed impressed enough with my answers to invite me to come on the air for the channel’s Sunday-morning Newsmakers on Nine show, where local folks gave their opinions on the issues of the day. I’d spent an hour on my makeup and allotted myself fifteen minutes to just sit quietly and catch my breath after wrestling myself into many layers of compressing undergarments, and now here I was. I’d calibrated my dosage carefully; just two pills, enough to take the edge off, to let me push through the sorrow that threatened to keep me pinned to the bed in despair.