got to be. You might think I was drawn to that type, but I don't think so. It was just my lot in life."
"He hit your mom?"
"Never," she said sharply.
"Never.
He would have lost her forever if he raised a hand to her even once, and he knew it, too. People talk about uncontrollable rages. Very few of 'em are really uncontrollable all the way. The tide sweeps up the beach, but it won't go past the sandbags. Most people have sandbags of a sort in their lives. The things you won't say, the things you won't do. My dad grew up on a dairy farm, and if he had his druthers, he'd have had me raised with a milk pail in my hands. But he had a family to support. And there were certain economic realities to be faced. So I grew up in a subdivision in Virginia, outside of Norfolk. He worked in an electrical equipment plant; Mom worked as a receptionist at a doctor's office."
"Maybe something else that drew you to the medical profession."
"The suburbs of the medical profession, anyway." Laurel closed her eyes for a moment. "The place where I grew up wasn't much of anything, but it had a good school district, and that's something they cared about. Good arts program, I guess. They thought I'd do well there. Mom cared a lot about that. Maybe too much. You could tell she used to think Dad was going to make more of himself than he ever did. She kept telling him to ask for a raise, a promotion. Then one day she ended up talking to some people at the plant-it might have been a bake sale at the school, some event like that-and, well, I didn't put it together right away, but I guess she was led to understand that the plant was only keeping Dad on the payroll in the first place out of kindness. His Vietnam service and all. So a promotion wasn't really in the cards. Mom changed a little after that. I think she was sad at first, and then business-like. Like she'd just given up on him, but she'd made her bed and had to lie in it."
"Which left you."
"As a vehicle for hoping? Yeah." A trace of bitterness entered her voice. "And when I won my first Oscar and thanked her in front of a billion television viewers, well, you can see how all her dreams came true."
"She's dead, isn't she?" Ambler said gently. "They both are."
"I guess she was never prouder than when they saw me play Maria in the high-school production of West Side Story," Laurel said, her voice thickening. Ambler saw that her eyes had grown moist. She turned to him, but in her voice was the distance of something old newly recollected. "I can still hear my dad hooting and whistling when the curtain came down, and stamping his foot. But it was when they were driving home that it happened."
"You don't have to say it, Laurel."
Tears were rolling down her cheeks, dampening the pillow beneath her head. "There was an icy patch on some intersection and a municipal trash hauler fishtailed there, and Dad just wasn't paying attention, he'd had a couple of beers and they were both happy, and he was driving a company truck when he plowed into the van, and it was filled with electrical equipment. The truck stopped; the equipment kept flying forward. Crushed them both. They were in the hospital, in a coma, for another two days, and then they both gave out, died within the very same hour."
She squeezed her eyes shut, trying to clear the wetness from them, striving to regain control. "Maybe it changed me. Maybe it didn't. But it became part of me, you know? A drop of dioxin in the watershed."
The wound had been bandaged and healed by time, Ambler knew, but it was not the kind of wound that could ever heal fully. Ambler knew, too, exactly why it was important to her that he know. She wanted him to know her- needed him to know her, not just who she was but how she became who she was. Her very identity was what she sought to share with him. It was an identity that was composed of a hundred thousand mosaic tiles, a hundred thousand incidents and memories, and yet was unitary all the same, a single, unquestioned thing. An entity that was hers -no, an entity that was her.
Ambler felt a