the corner of the house, but it took a few minutes. She stopped, just stood there in the middle of the driveway, her arms limp.

They let Jimmy take her through the gate, out to the end of the cul-de-sac, to the empty street across from the white house.

It wasn’t something she could tell. Not yet. He saw that. She was trembling, but then it would stop, and she would be so still he would have shaken her if her eyes were closed. To see if she was alive. She just stood there, her back to the house, her eyes on the opposite ridgetop. It was only now that Jimmy realized where the city was, by the blue-gray edge to the scrub at the top of the hill. As if L.A. itself was a Sailor. It was what she was looking at.

“Which room were you in?” Jimmy said. He put his arm around her. She was as tall as he was, but that night, now, she seemed diminished.

“The study, the office,” she said.

Maybe this was the way to let her unburden herself, a piece at a time. He didn’t ask another question for a long time, long enough for a helicopter to fly over, coming in from the south, headed for Mulholland or the valley beyond. Jimmy wondered how long it would take for the first news cameras to arrive. He didn’t want to be out in the open like this then.

“You were asleep?”

She nodded. She’d gone slack again, still. He dropped his hand from around her waist. She didn’t seem to notice.

“David and Michelle were in my room,” she said. “Off the hallway. So I went to the other end, to the office to sleep. The couch. I told them all this.” She said the last imploringly, exasperated.

Then she seemed to remember who he was, who he wasn’t.

“I’m sorry.”

There were voices from somewhere. They both turned. Shafts of light were projected on the slab of hillside behind the house, sweeping flashlights. The cops were in the slice of concreted “backyard” between the house and the rock. The pool was on the other end of the house. Their voices, indistinct, guttural, masculine, rude, were rebounding off the rock, amplified somehow by the arrangement of things.

“I have to find someplace to go,” Mary said, a crack of panic in her voice.

“You’re going to stay with me,” Jimmy said.

He took her home.

People always think someone should sleep when a thing like this happens, that the person can sleep. But Jimmy had been through his own version of a world-wrenching blowup. The ground had opened up in front of him once, too. He knew what it meant, knew what you saw when you closed your eyes in those first hours. Everything can change in an hour, if it’s the wrong hour. So when he got Mary home, he asked her what she wanted to do. The bedroom door was open behind them.

“I guess lie down,” she said.

He left her sitting on the bed, sitting in the center of it, with her legs crossed under her. He left the door open halfway. Something else he knew to do.

As he walked away, she came out of the bedroom, went into the bathroom. He listened at the door. He wasn’t sure what he was listening for, but thought he should listen. She washed her hands for a long time, with the water on full.

“At first, they put my hands in plastic bags,” she had told him before, as they were backing away down the cul-de-sac in the Cadillac. “Then they took them off. They never said why.”

In the kitchen, Jimmy took a bottle of water from the icebox, left the door open for the cool and the light. He didn’t turn on the overhead, sat at the turquoise Formica table, cracked the seal, and drank it down. He looked out at the lights of the city below his house. The kitchen window was closed. The little house didn’t have air-conditioning, or even a wheezing window unit in the bedroom. He didn’t know if opening the window would make it cooler or hotter. He reached back into the refrigerator, opened the freezer door, and pulled out an ice tray. He held it upside down over the table and twisted it. The cubes clattered out like dice in a complicated game. He picked up one and sucked it like a Popsicle.

He knew the layout of the house up in Benedict. Two nights ago there’d been a party he didn’t