Balance of Power

States.'

    'All I need do for you to resent me,' Lara shot back, 'is exist.' Fighting her own anger, she finished, 'I'm marrying a man who treats me with respect. You deserve that, too.'

    Joan stood straighter. 'We have a good life,' she insisted. 'He's good to Marie. It's not that often, or that bad.'

    'How often does it have to be, Joanie? How bad does it have to get?'

    Joan's voice rose. 'That's so easy for you to say. What does your life have to do with mine?'

    'I'm your sister, and I care about you. We're not competing.' Lara paused, speaking more quietly, 'Don't take a beating on my account. Or Marie's.'

    Abruptly, Joan turned from her. 'Please leave, Lara. This is my home. I didn't invite you here.'

    Gazing at her sister's back, Lara felt frustration turn to helplessness, then a piercing regret. Briefly, she touched her sister's shoulder.

    Joan remained frozen, back still turned to Lara. After a moment, Lara let herself out.

    'I'm worse than useless to her,' Lara said sadly. 'Proving me wrong is one more reason for her to stay.'

    In the thin November sunlight of midmorning, she and Kerry walked through a narrow valley in Marin County, headed toward a bluegrey ocean which flooded an inlet between jagged cliffs. Both craved exercise, escape from people and stifling rooms; on the road they scheduled an hour, when they could, to walk and talk and breathe fresh air. At a respectful distance, Secret Service agents walked in front and back of them; others watched above them, along steep hills, green from recent rains. As they continued, hands jammed in their pockets against the cold, Kerry gave her a searching look. 'She resents you that much?'

    'I'd forgotten quite how much. Perhaps I was hoping we'd outgrown it.' Lara gazed ahead of them at the glint of distant waves. 'Some working-class mothers might have knocked me down a peg, reminded me that I was nothing special. But Mom held me up as their example.

    'They had to excel, like me. They had to go to college, like me, even if they couldn't get into Stanford, or win a scholarship.' Pausing, Lara added with irony, 'So I made things worse by paying their way.'

    This elicited, in Kerry, a faint smile. 'Half the time,' he told her, 'I loathed my brother. Jamie was so damned good at everything—so untouchable, it seemed. He was entirely self-invented, I realize now, and very much alone. But then he was the last person on earth I'd ever feel compassion for. Or listen to.'

    Quiet, Lara moved closer, so that their arms brushed. At times she felt such relief at all they shared, a blessed release from the sense of solitude she had lived with for so long, that it overwhelmed her ability to tell him. 'It's that,' she finally said, 'and more. Joan became the domestic one—helping Mom cook and clean, keeping track of things, not complaining. That was her value, the thing she was better at than me or Mary. When John Bowden came along, and wanted to enshrine her as the princess of a perfect household all her own, she was more than ready.'

    'What did you think of him?'

    'Eager to please—a little too eager, I thought. He virtually courted our mother, as if to prove how helpful and considerate he was. I remember her telling Joanie not to let him get away.' Lara's tone became soft. 'Then they got married, and I moved to Washington for the Times. Marie was born about the time I met you. They were the ideal family, Joanie claimed.'

    Listening, Kerry heard more than the words themselves: that Lara felt she had been too caught up in her own career, and Kerry, to see the warning signs. 'And then you went to Kosovo,' he said. 'How could you have known?'

    This tacit reference to their own estrangement caused Lara to take his hand. 'I do now, don't I.'

    They walked in silence until they reached the beach, a grey-brown skein of sand strewn with driftwood. A redwood log stripped of bark had washed up near the lapping waves; after Lara sat, wind rustling her hair, Kerry did the same. 'When I started prosecuting domestic violence cases,' he said at length, 'I began to see this depressing, endless cycle. Kids who witness abuse and then grow up to be abusive—or abused. In time, Marie could become Joan.'

    'So how do I help them?'

    'Someone should do something. But you may not be the one.'

Turning, Kerry faced her. 'If you don't mind, I'd like to talk to Joan myself.'

    At once, Lara felt resistant. 'This is my family. I know them. I'm not going to dump our problems on you.'

    'They're about to be our family.' Kerry looked at her intently. 'You already know about my own. Too often people treat this as a family matter, something private, and it just gets worse. We've both seen way too much of that.'

    Still Lara hesitated. Softly, Kerry asked, 'What if he kills her, Lara?'

FOUR

The next morning, Kerry Kilcannon went to the Bowdens' home.

    That this proved difficult reminded Kerry of the new strictures on his movement. Slipping the press was hard in itself; worse, Kerry was forced to wait in a nondescript Secret Service van while two agents introduced themselves to a startled Joan Bowden and asked permission to search the house. Kerry's only consolation was the certainty that her husband was not home; at his absolute insistence, the agents assigned to guard him agreed to wait outside.

    When she opened the door, her swollen eye was no more than a slit. Kerry tried not to react to her disfigurement.

    'I'm Kerry,' he said.

    Joan glanced past him as though worried he might be seen. Then she gave him a small, rueful smile. 'I know who you are.'

    Kerry tilted his head. 'May I come in?'

    'All right,' she said reluctantly, and then added with more courtesy, 'Of course.'

    He stepped inside, hands in the pockets of his overcoat. The room was bright and orderly. But the visceral feeling he had on entering a home where abuse had occurred made the violence feel near at hand.

    He turned to Joan. Whereas Lara resembled her mother—slender, with a certain tensile delicacy—Joan was rounder, with snub, placidseeming features altered, on this day, by a wary, guarded look. 'I've felt funny,' Kerry told her, 'having an almost-wife whose family I'd never met.'

    As Joan smiled, a polite movement of the lips, she seemed to study him. 'It was strange for us, too. You and Lara came as a surprise.'

    Though he felt the irony of his own evasion, Kerry gave his accustomed response. 'It even surprised me,' he answered. 'When I got shot, Lara awakened to my virtues. A hard way to get the girl.'

    Joan appraised him. Then, belatedly, she motioned him to an overstuffed chair, and sat on the couch across from him. Kerry resolved to be direct. 'Lara loves you,' he said simply. 'And now she worries for you.'

    Curtly, Joan nodded, as if confirming her own suspicion. 'So she asked you to come.'

    'No—I asked.' Kerry looked at Joan intently. 'I used to prosecute domestic violence cases. I've seen too many 'family secrets' go wrong, too many people damaged. Especially children.'

    That there was more to this Kerry did not say. But the purple swelling of her eye stirred all of the emotions his