to emerge into the earth. A new person, suckled on her fluids. It was a miracle beyond the miraculous, and sometimes Laura couldn't believe it was really about to happen. But here it was, two weeks until a birth day. She watched the young mother smooth a white blanket around the infant's face, and then the woman glanced up at her. Their eyes met for a few seconds, and the two women passed a smile of recognition of labors past and yet to be.
'A purpose,' Carol repeated. 'If you'd wanted one of those, you could've come over and helped me paint my condo.'
'I'm serious. Doug has his purpose: making money, for himself and his clients. He does a good job at it. But what do I have? Don't say the newspaper, please. I've gone about as far as I can go there. I know I'm paid well and I have a cushy job, but -' She paused, trying to put her feelings into words. 'That's something anybody can do. The place won't fold if I'm not at my desk.' She cut a piece of salmon but left it on her plate. 'I want to be needed,' she told Carol. 'Needed in a way that no one else can match. Do you understand?'
'I guess so.' She looked a little uncomfortable at this personal revelation.
'It doesn't have anything to do with money or possessions. Not the house, not the car, not clothes or anything else. It's having someone who needs you, day and night. That's what I want. And, thank God, that's what I'm going to have.'
Carol was attacking her salad. 'I still say,' she observed, a shred of crabmeat on her fork, 'that a puppy would have been less expensive. And puppies don't want to shave all their hair off except for a rat-tail hanging down in back, either. They don't like punk rock and heavy metal, they don't chase girls, and they won't get their front teeth knocked out at football practice. Oh, Jesus, Laura!' She reached across the table and gripped Laura's hand. 'Swear you won't name him Bo or Bubba! I won't be godmother to a kid who chews tobacco! Swear it, okay?'
'We've decided on a name,' Laura said. 'David. After my grandfather.'
'David.' Carol repeated it a couple of times. 'Not Davy or Dave, right?'
'Right David.'
'I like that. David Clayborne. President of the Student Government Association, the University of Georgia, nineteen… oh Lord, when would that be?'
'Wrong century. Try twenty ten.'
Carol gasped. 'I'll be ancient!' she said. 'Shriveled up and ancient! I'd better get some pictures made so David'll know how pretty I used to be!'
Laura had to laugh at Carol's expression of merry terror. 'I think you've got plenty of time for that.'
They veered away from talking about the forthcoming new arrival, and Carol, who was also a reporter on the Constitution's social desk, entertained Laura with more tales from the trenches. Then her lunch break was over, and it was time for Carol to get back to work. They said good-bye in front of the restaurant as the valets brought their cars, and then Laura drove home while cold drizzle fell from a gray winter sky. She lived about ten minutes away from Lenox Square, on Moore's Mill Road off West Paces Ferry. The white brick house was on a small plot of land with pine trees in front. The place wasn't large, particularly in comparison to the other houses in the area, but it had carried a steep price tag. Doug had said he'd wanted to live close to the city, so when they found the property through the friend of a friend they'd been willing to spend the money. Laura pulled into the two-car garage, opened an umbrella, and walked back out to the mailbox. Inside were a half-dozen letters, the new issue of The Atlantic Monthly, and catalogues from Saks and Barnes and Noble. Laura went back into the garage and pressed the code numbers in on the security system, then she unlocked a door that led into the kitchen. She shed her raincoat and looked through the letters. Electric bill, water bill, a letter whose envelope read MR. AND MRS. CLEYBURN YOU HAVE WON AN ALL-EXPENSES-PAID TRIP TO DISNEY WORLD!, and three more letters that Laura held on to after she'd pushed aside the bills and the desperate come-on for the sale of Florida swampland. She walked through a hallway into the den, where she punched on the answering machine to check her messages.
Beep. 'This is Billy Hathaway from Clements Roofing and Gutter Service, returnin' your call. Missed you, I guess. My number's 555-2142. Thanks.'
Beep. 'Laura, it's Matt. I just wanted to make sure you got the books. So you're going to lunch with Carol today, huh? Are you a glutton for punishment? Have you decided to name the kid after me? Talk to you later.'
Beep. Click.
Beep. 'Mrs. Clayborne, this is Marie Gellsing from Homeless Aid of Atlanta. I wanted to thank you for your kind contribution and the reporter you sent to give us some publicity. We really need all the help we can get. So thanks again. Good-bye.'
And that was it.
Laura walked over to the tapedeck, pushed in a tape of Chopin piano preludes, and eased herself down in a chair as the first sparkling notes began to play. She opened the first letter, which was from Help for Appalachia. It was a note requesting aid. The second letter was from Fund for Native Americans, and the third was from the Cousteau Society. Doug said she was a sucker for causes, that she was on a national mailing list of organizations that made you think the world would collapse if you didn't send a check to prop it up. He believed most of the various funds and societies were already rich, and you could tell that because of the quality of their paper and envelopes. Maybe ten percent of contributions get where they're supposed to go, Doug had told her. The rest, he said, went to accounting fees, salaries, building rents, office equipment, and the like. So why do you keep sending them more money?
Because, Laura had told him, she was doing what she thought was right. Maybe some of the funds she donated to were shams, maybe not. But she wasn't going to miss the money, and it all came from her newspaper salary.
But there was another reason she gave to charities, and perhaps it was the most important one. Purely and simply, she felt guilty that she had so much in a world where so many suffered. But the hell of it was that she enjoyed her manicures, her steambaths, and her nice clothes; she'd worked hard for them, hadn't she? She deserved her pleasures, and anyway she'd never used cocaine or bought animal-skin coats and she'd sold her stock in the company that did so much business in South Africa. And had made a lot of profit from the sale, too. But Jesus, she was thirty-six years old! Thirty-six! Didn't she deserve the fine things she'd worked so hard for?
Deserve, she thought. Who really deserved anything? Did the homeless deserve to shiver in alleys? Did the harp seals deserve to be clubbed and slaughtered? Did the homosexual deserve AIDS, or the wealthy woman deserve a fifteen-thousand-dollar designer dress? Deserve was a dangerous word, Laura thought. It was a word that built barriers, and made wrong seem right.
She put the letters aside, on a small table next to her checkbook.
A package of four books had come in the mail yesterday, sent from Matt Kantner at the Constitution. Laura was supposed to read them and do reviews for the Arts and Leisure section over the next month or so. She'd scanned them yesterday, when she'd been sitting by the fireplace and the rain was coming down outside. There was the new novel by Anthony Burgess, a nonfiction book on Central America, a novel about Hollywood called The Address, and a fourth nonfiction work that had instantly caught her attention.
Laura picked it up from where it sat beside her chair with a bookmark in it. It was a thin book, only one hundred and seventy-eight pages, and not very well produced. The covers were already warping, the paper was of poor quality, and though the pub date was 1989, the book had a faintly moldy smell. The publisher's name was Mountaintop Press, based in Chattanooga, Tennessee. The title was Burn This Book, by Mark Treggs. There was no author's picture on the back, only an ad for another book about edible mushrooms and wildflowers, also written by Mark Treggs.
Looking through Burn This Book brought back some of the feelings that had surfaced when she was sitting in the Fish Market. Mark Treggs, as recounted in the slim memoir, had been a student at Berkeley in 1964, and had lived in Haight-Ashbury in San Francisco during the era of love-ins, long hair, free LSD, happenings, and skirmishes with the police in Peoples' Park. He wrote wistfully of communes, of crash pads hazed with marijuana fumes, where discussions of Allen Ginsburg poems and Maoist theories mingled into abstract philosophies of God and nature. He talked about draft card burnings, and massive marches against Vietnam. When he described the smell and sting of tear gas, he made Laura's eyes water and her throat feel raw. He made that time seem romantic and lost, a communion of outlaws battling for the common cause of peace. Seen in hindsight, though, Laura realized there was as much struggle for power between the various factions of unrest as there was between the protesters and the Establishment. In hindsight, that era was not as romantic as it was tragic. Laura thought of it as the last scream of
