Mine

'That's right. I was thinking of the baby.'

'Oh.' She nodded. Her mother had always loved babies; it was when they got older that she turned her back in boredom. Mary had taken a gamble, and it had worked. 'Okay, I can dig it.'

'I'd like to know why you stole him from his mother.'

'I'm his mother,' Mary said flatly. 'I told you. I've named him Drummer.'

Natalie moved out of the corner. Mary's gaze tracked her across the room, and her mother stopped near the cold fireplace made of fieldstones. 'Stealing a baby is a new one for you, isn't it? Murders, bombings, and terrorism weren't enough for you? You had to steal an innocent child not two days old?'

'Talk, talk,' Mary said. 'You're still the same, talking that shit.'

'You'd better listen to me, damn it!' Natalie snapped, much louder than she'd intended. 'By God, they're going to hunt you down for this! They'll kill you and drag your body through the street! Sweet Jesus, what's in your mind to make you do such a thing?'

Mary was silent for a moment. She set the Colt down on a table, close enough to get it fast if she needed it. The coast was clear, though; the pigs were sniffing around the family's beach house by now. 'I always wanted a baby,' Mary told her. 'One of my own, I mean. From my own body.'

'And so you steal another woman's child?'

'Talking shit,' Mary chided her mother. Then: 'I almost had a baby once. Before I got hurt. That was a long time ago, but… sometimes I still think I can feel the baby kick. Maybe it's a ghost, huh? A ghost, up inside me trying to get out. Well, I let the ghost out. I gave him bones, skin, and a name: Drummer. He's my baby now, and no one in this mindfucked world's going to take him away from me.'

'They'll kill you. They'll hunt you down and kill you, and you know it.'

'Let them try. I'm ready.'

Natalie heard a sound that made her sick with anguish: the thin noise of a baby crying, from the guest bedroom. Mary said, 'He's a good kid. He doesn't cry very much.'

'Aren't you going to go get him?'

'No. He'll go back to sleep in a few minutes.'

'He's hungry!' She felt her cold cheeks redden with anger. 'Are you letting him starve to death?'

'I've got formula for him. Don't you get it, Mother? I love Drummer. I'm not going to let anything hap -'

'Balls,' Natalie said, and she strode past her daughter into the hallway. She reached out, found a light switch, and turned on the overhead light. It stung her eyes for a few seconds, and she heard Mary pick up the gun again. Natalie continued into the guest bedroom, turned on a lamp, and looked at the crying, red-faced baby wrapped in a coarse gray blanket on the bed. She wasn't prepared for the sight of such a small infant, and her heart ached. This child's mother – Laura Clayborne they said her name was – must be ready for an asylum by now. She picked up the crying infant and held him against her. 'There, there,' she said. 'It's all right, everything's going to be all -'

Mary came into the room. Natalie saw the animal cunning in her daughter's eyes, the years of hardscrabble living etched on her face. Mary once was a beautiful, vivacious young woman, the belle of the ball in Richmond society. Now she resembled a bag lady, used to living under train trestles and eating out of cast-iron pots. Natalie looked quickly away from her, before her eyes were overpowered by the waste of a human being. 'This child's hungry. You can hear it in his crying. And he needs his diaper changed! Damn right, you don't know the first thing about taking care of a baby, do you?'

'I've had some practice,' Mary said, watching her mother rock Drummer with a gentle motion.

'Where's the formula? We're going to warm some up and feed this child, right this minute!'

'It's in the car. You'll walk down to the boathouse with me, won't you?' It was a command, not a question. Natalie hated the boathouse; it was where Grant had hanged himself from an overhead rafter.

When they returned, Natalie switched on the kitchen stove and warmed a bottle of formula. Mary sat at the small table and watched her mother feed the freshly diapered Drummer, the Colt near at hand. The shine of light on her mother's diamond rings drew Mary's attention. 'That's right, that's right,' Natalie crooned. 'Baby's having a good dinner now, isn't him? Yes, him is!'

'Did you ever hold me like that?' Mary asked.

Natalie ceased her crooning. The baby sucked noisily at the nipple.

'What about Grant? Did you hold him like that, too?'

The nipple popped out of the infant's mouth. He made a little wailing sound of need, and Natalie guided the nipple back into his cupid's-bow lips. What would Mary do, she wondered, if she were to suddenly turn away, walk out of this house with David Clayborne, and get into the car? Her gaze fixed on the Colt and then skittered away.

Mary read it. 'I'll take my son now,' she said, and she stood up and lifted Drummer away from her mother. Drummer kept feeding, staring up at her with big, unfocused blue eyes. 'Isn't he pretty? I almost had a wreck looking at him. He's so pretty, isn't he?'

'He's not your son.'

'Talking shit,' Mary crooned to Drummer. 'Talking shit shit shit, yes she is.'

'Please listen to me! It's not right! I don't know why you did this, or what… what's in your mind, but you can't keep him! You've got to give him up! Listen to me!' she insisted as Mary turned her back. 'I'm begging you! Don't put this child in danger! Do you hear me?'

Silence, but for the sucking. Then: 'I hear you.'

'Leave him with me. I'll take him to the police. Then you can go on wherever you want to, I don't care. Lose yourself. Go underground. Just let me take that child back where he belongs.'

'He's already where he belongs.'

Natalie glanced at the pistol again, lying on the table. Two steps away. Did she dare? Was it loaded, or not? If she picked it up, could she use it if she had to? Her mind careened toward a decision.

Mary held the baby with one hand and retrieved the gun with the other. She tucked it down in the waistband of her faded denims. 'Mother,' she said, and she looked into Natalie's face with her cold, intense eyes in that hard and bitter face, 'we don't live in the same world. We never did. I played the game for as long as I could stand it. Then I knew: your world would break me if I didn't fight back. It would grind me down, put me in a wedding dress and give me a diamond ring, and I would look across the dining room table at some stupid stranger and hear the screams of injustice every day of my life, but by then I'd be too weak to care. I'd live in a big house in Richmond with foxhunt paintings on the walls, and I'd worry about finding good help. I'd think that maybe we should have nuked Vietnam, and I wouldn't give a shit about whether the pigs billy-clubbed students in the streets and whether the Mindfuck State got fat on the bodies of the uneducated masses. Your world would have killed me, Mother. Can't you understand?'

'All that is past history,' Natalie answered. 'The fighting in the streets is over. The student rebellions, the protests… all of it is gone. Why can't you let it go?'

Mary smiled thinly. 'It's not gone. People just forgot. I'm going to make them remember.'

'How? By committing more murders?'

'I'm a soldier. My war didn't end. It'll never end.' She kissed Drummer on the forehead, and her mother flinched. 'He's part of the next generation. He'll carry on the fight. I'll teach him what we did for freedom, and he'll know the war's never over.' She smiled into the baby's face. 'My sweet, sweet Drummer.'

Natalie Terrell had thought for over twenty years that her daughter was unbalanced. Now it came at her in a savage rush: she was standing in a kitchen with a madwoman who held a bottle of formula to an infant's lips. There was no way to reach her, she was beyond touching, a resident of a world of twisted patriotism and midnight slaughters. For the first time, she feared for her own life.

'So you sent them to the beach house,' Mary said, still looking at Drummer. 'That was motherly of you. Well, they'll find out soon enough that I'm not there. The pigs won't be kind to you, Mother. You may get a taste of the whip.'

'I did it because I didn't want to see that child hurt, and I hoped -'

'I know what you hoped. That you could put me in your fist and mold me, like you tried to mold Grant. No, no; I won't be molded. I suppose I can't stay here much longer, can I?'

'They'll find you wherever you go.'

'Oh, I've done pretty well up until now.' She looked at her mother, and saw she was afraid. It made her feel