up some rice salad between his fingers, but most of his attention is focused on the pile of twigs and leaves and a pebble before him. Lore wonders what he is making, but Oster is in the way.
Oster is talking to Stella, who is sitting on the stone rim of the fountain, drinking straight from a bottle of vodka. This month, Stella’s hair is layered: bruise purple on top and underneath—when she lifts her head to swallow—red, then ocher, then white. Unnerving, like splitting open a bruise with a scalpel, seeing blood, fatty tissue, bone.
“So, tell me how you managed to stay out of the scandal at Belmopan last month.”
Oster’s words suggest he is tolerant of and mildly amused by Stella’s increasingly wild exploits with her set of friends, but Lore can tell—by the way his fingers are pick-picking at the cloth of his shorts and the glances he shoots up at Stella from under his brows when he thinks she is not looking—that he does not understand his daughter any more than he would if he had planted a potato and grown a rose.
“I wasn’t there that night.” She pauses to suck at her bottle. “I was passed out in my room.”
Lore wonders about that. She thinks either Stella drinks less than she pretends to or she is extraordinarily lucky. For while Stella appears to go through the motions—driving recklessly while under the influence of various drugs, swimming with sharks while drunk—the accidents she has only ever seem to involve property or the occasional species of wildlife not on the endangered list.
“I assume you have at least six people who are willing to back you up on that,” Oster says, trying for irony, but sounding waspish.
Stella laughs, and Lore wonders if the rest of the family understand how shrewd her sister is. In the last four years of wild behavior, she has never injured herself or another person, nor been the subject of any scandal that would have a negative impact on her character. Media-literate people on five continents probably know her name, but they speak it with a smile and a shake of the head, not with a spitting curse. Lore has always wondered why Stella does nothing with her intelligence and wit but travel from one party to another with as much fanfare as possible. She wonders for the first time whether or not Stella has a purpose, but cannot figure out what it might be.
It is getting hot. The sunlight makes Stella’s upturned bottle sparkle. “I think I’ll take a swim.” She sets the bottle down on the rim of the fountain and stands up. She has unbuttoned half of her dress before Lore realizes she has no clothes on underneath. Oster is a little slower.
“What are you doing?”
“Preparing to climb into this nice cool water with the fish. Who probably have more feeling than some people.” She glances over at Katerine, who pretends not to notice.
“But . . .” Oster seems to know he has missed something.
Stella pauses, dress halfway off her shoulder. “What’s the matter? Don’t you want to see what a fine figure your daughter has?”
Katerine simply ignores them.
“Stella! This is not appropriate—”
Stella laughs, a great, brittle shout. “Appropriate? Since when has this family ever been appropriate?”
Oster is looking confused and Katerine still staring at nothing when Stella lets her dress fall from her shoulders and steps into the fountain. The dress catches on the vodka bottle and as the material sinks, waterlogged, into the fountain, the bottle teeters, then falls toward the pool. Katerine and Oster dive for it at the same time. Lore is not sure who actually catches it, but the bottle comes up out of the water grasped by two tanned and streaming arms. Oster relinquishes it to Katerine. He wades into the fountain and shouts. “What are you doing? I don’t understand you. Why are you doing this?”
But Lore is watching Tok, who is looking at Stella, and his expression is terrible, as though some huge revelation has fisted into his face and crumpled it like tin. He has a twig in his hand and Lore can see how white the skin is where he grips it. She wants to rush over there and cry Tok! Tok! but quite simply dares not. She thinks that if she calls him back from whatever horror he has seen he will return without some vital part of himself. She has read many fairy tales and understands instinctively that those who are