Thanks to the kind intercession of Declan Boyle and his close personal friends we were housesitting for the next fifty weeks at his home away from home on top of Red Mountain. I was playing nurse but not quite in the same way Declan Boyle had done on Sutton Place with his hired help in the high white stockings with the nurse’s hat pinned to his harlot’s hair. Amanda Madison was sitting up and taking nourishment – a little chicken soup, as it turned out – and taking in the view of Ajax and the city below from her bed. She had come a long way but there was still a long way to go, and there was still a deadness in her eyes that scared the hell out of me when she looked at me or when we tried to talk for more than a sentence or two. But she was completely okay with me being there in sickness and in health.

Baby steps.

I was reading books about victims and kidnappings and concentration camps and Patty Hearst and that was helping me, but there was no way to know what she was going through. She had found a therapist in Carbondale that she loved, but at night in bed I could tell her mind was spinning around like a load of laundry that will never dry.
 Today was a big day because Ozzie, McGuff, and Katherine Hallaby were all coming for brunch – our first time for company up on Red Mountain. I brought her a pair of jeans and a white sleeveless T-shirt with a high collar that she liked, but makeup beyond lipstick was an abstract concept. Amanda Madison was in fact a shadow of herself, and no amount of eye shadow was going to change that. There was nothing either one of us could do about it any way, other than to wait and see what our 50 weeks on Red Mountain would bring.

One of the things it would bring today was what in simpler times you might call a party. The people who counted most to us were all in Aspen and were all coming over. Ozzie came first with enough liquor to keep a yurt warm for the winter. Katherine Hallaby brought this delicious lobster dip she said she always made. McGuff brought nothing except his new sense of possessiveness about Katherine Hallaby and the Lakers.

“Dudes!” he said.

“You’ve been spending too much time in Aspen,” I said.

“Somebody’s got to keep your place clean,” he said. ”And write that hot Dreamworks script for ‘All That’s Sacred.’”

Amanda almost laughed. She was getting there but she wasn’t there yet. They all hugged her and lied to her face about how good she looked. When they turned away from her, first Ozzie, then Katherine Hallaby, then McGuff all looked at me like they had just walked face-first into a door they didn’t know was there. It was just a moment between each of me and them, with no further explanation necessary.

Sometimes I was too close to her to know that it was that bad.

When I looked at Amanda Madison I could see she knew the story. She could remember the kind of person she’d been before but it was just muscle memory and nothing more, the way an amputee can feel a limb that is no longer there. Ozzie nodded me into the kitchen.

“People I know,” he said, “they know people who got their hands on Skip Taylor’s computer.”

“The reporter they clotheslined.”

“These people are saying Skip Taylor was closing in on Bruckman and Charles Evans when his neck ran into that piano wire,” Ozzie said. “They say it was all on his computer at work. Enough to send them both to Sing-Sing for a long, long time.”

“They won’t go down easy,” I said.

“No, my brother,” Ozzie said. “But they are going down.”

“From your lips,” I said.

McGuff was boring Amanda with some story about David Geffen’s house in Hollywood, and she was smiling with her mouth but not her eyes. I was riding to the rescue when I heard a short had rap on the door that had to be Jimmy Burns with Angie Frangello and the package they promised to bring. Angie came in first and gave a low slow whistle when she looked around the trophy house. Jimmy came in with the package, a beautiful blue-eyed baby with the sweetest pink lips you ever saw.

“Be still my heart,” I said.

Angie handed me the baby and I’ve never felt anything like it in my life. It had that baby smell and I was not about to let it go for nothing. McGuff, Ozzie, and Katherine Hallaby crowded around in the living room and stared cooing and oohing.

“I’ll give you a million bucks for it,” I said.

“For her, Bag Man,” Jimmy said.

“Baggie, my ass,” Angie said. “He’s Money Bags, now.”

“Be nice to rich Uncle Arnie,” Jimmy said to the baby I held in my arms.

I handed the baby to Amanda. Amanda started to rock her so slowly you could barely see it.

“We called her Amanda,” Angie Frangello said. “Amanda Frangello Burns. We want her to grow up to be just like you.”

Amanda kissed the baby on the top of the head and then she started to weep. She had every right in the world.
Much later, after everyone had left us alone in the house, we had taken our showers and the steam was seeping into the 20-foot stall so that we could not see a thing outside on Red Mountain. Without a word, without any plan, we sat down carefully on the facing seats carved to fit the exact forms of the actual owners. The fit was not perfect.

“They were made for someone else,” Amanda said. “Someone with a much smaller butt than me.”

“Someone with longer legs than mine.”

“Still,” she said.

“Still and all,” I said. “We are naked.”

“And we are together.”

“And you are beautiful,” I said. “And I do love you.”

She ran the toes of both her feet up the inside of both of my legs. It was the first time she had touched me without me touching her first in a long, long time.

“Hey,” I said.

“Hey you,” she whispered.

You would be amazed at the things a woman can do with her toes.