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"Come with s aiting there, lying quietly together, as though they knew-or as though one of them knew-that the supreme test of Brian and Amy’s relationship would occur in this room

His apartment study had theeled office chairs for those occasions when one of his employees came from downstairs to work here with him He rolled both behind his desk

He directed A her in the other They were knee to knee

In their front-row seats, Fred, Ethel, and Nickie watched with grave interest

When Brian held out his hands, pale to speak "There’s soht, the way things were, maybe I’d never need to tell you"

When he hesitated, she did not press hiaze reer, I was an idiot about a lot of things One of theht it was easy, women were a kind of sport God, that sounds awful But it’s the way soto teach ," she said

"No It’s one long lesson So…there were a number of women, too many I left all the precautions to them, because they seemed to think it was a sport, too I knew they wouldn’t risk pregnancy They didn’t want consequences They just wanted to get it off But one of the, but she didn’t take precautions I fathered a child"

His one dry His throat felt swollen, a trap to keep in all his words

"I think about -is she all right, is she ever given a chance to be happy, is she at least safe? With Vanessa…she can’t be safe I tried to find her I couldn’t I’ve failed as a father, as a s"

Amy said, "No failure is forever"

"It feels like forever I’ve only seen her once, briefly, when she was an infant How can I love a child sois, you can You’ve got that capacity in you"

"She’s a Down’s syndroel, beautiful I doubt she even knows I exist I’ve wanted to see her so bad, for ten years I’ve wanted to see her, but I never expected to see her again And now…everything is changing"

A There’s still you and ht and tucked, the pillows pluy is required to keep her room clean, and periodically her mother conducts an inspection with stern standards and with sterner punishments

Harrow suspects that the child would keep a spotless room even if she were not required to do so The threat of chastiseuarantees her cleanliness

She exhibits a desire for order, for quiet continuity, and a longing for fixity in all affairs This is evident in the way she es and in the classic patterns of decoration that, with thread and needles, she applies to the dresses of the dolls

"Piggy, you can’t eat just the sandwich," says Moongirl "You don’t knohat a balanced diet y replies, but she still irl’s company, the child seldom raises her head, and she rarely makes eye contact She knows that her mother wants hu for order, huy learned to please her mother This quality is as natural to her as feathers to a bird

Self-abasenity that should not have survived ten years like those she has endured

She accepts the scorn, the insults, the meanness that her h it is what she deserves, but she refuses to disgrace herself She can be dishonored by another but never abased

Harrow suspects that the girl’s innate dignity, free of pride, is what has kept her alive Her nizes this quality in her and wants, , to destroy it before she destroys the child

To please Moongirl, this breaking ; the spirit must be fatally wounded before the flesh is fed to fire

Now Piggy opens a lunchbox bag of potato chips, and her mother says, "That’s why you’re fat"

The child neither hesitates nor stuffs the chips into her mouth defiantly She proceeds calirl rips out the needlework froy is permitted to have these toys only so they can be taken from her as punishirl sees that the child has grown fond of one doll above the others, she acts She seems to have determined that the one on which she noorks is such a favorite

Sometimes, the child cries quietly She never sobs Her lower lip trembles, the tears roll down her face, and that is all

Harrow is certain that often, if not always, the tears are false, suy knows that tears are wanted, that her mother is a creature who feeds on tears

This is metaphorically true, but it is also a fact He has never seen Moongirl kiss her daughter, but twice he has seen her lick tears froy did not occasionally give her ht be dead by now The tears have suggested to Moongirl that in ti that she desires more than all else, for which she has been patient

The pent-up violence in Moongirl is like the adeath condensed in the perfect sphere of plutoniuered, the explosion will be aweso cut most of the needlework out of the doll’s dress, she now rends the dress itself, not with the scissors but with her bare hands, grinding her teeth with satisfaction as she rips each seanity can never be taken froy toinative ination fails him when he tries to envision the horrors that this wo her afire After ten years of unslaked thirst for infanticide and then parricide, Moongirl will surely y’s final hours

At the desk, the child opens the bag of cookies, again passing on the potato salad She has an instinct for her irl now holds a naed doll Its limbs are articulated so that it can be manipulated into almost any position But when she bends an elbow joint backward, she snaps off one of the forear y at the trough"

Power is the only thing that he ad that ical, physical, verbal violence-is the purest expression of power Absolute violence is absolute power

Watching Moongirl now, he wants in the worst way to take her down into their less room, into their perfect darkness, where they can do what they are, be what they do, down in the grasping greedy dark, down in the urgent animal dark

Chapter 34

In the sky’s distillery, the afternoon light was a weak brandy

Standing at a study , Brian said, "She seey, but fun After we’d been together awhile, I began to realize so with her"

Amy had sae She got the flavor from a few, and didn’t care to read netisnetism Truth She was hot, totally hot, and I knew she was unstable, but I eak That’s the sick truth"

He had begun this account facing Amy, but even ten years after these events, shame led him to prefer to confess to the

She wanted to move behind hied nothing between thee hiht weaken his resolve, that he are of this, that she ain

Fred and Ethel snoozed back to back, bookends without a book Nickie remained awake, more interested than she pretended to be