The Timer Game. Susan Smith Arnout

locked.’ Her lips were turning numb.

      ‘I’ve got a key, remember? I’ll be right there.’

      ‘Don’t. Don’t go. Don’t leave me.’

      ‘I’m right here. Take a breath. Come on. Come on, sweetie. Come on back.’

      Grace made herself open her eyes and she stared at the ceiling and forced her breathing to calm down. Her skin felt damp.

      ‘Where are you now? What’s happening?’

      Grace shook her head and closed her eyes. Her feet were cold and she burrowed them under the pillows. ‘If I drove. I could.’

      Jeanne crunched down hard on the lozenge and the noise made Grace wince.

      ‘Sure. There’s Vons on Rosecrans but why mess around pretending you need milk? Just hit the first liquor store you can find and get it over with. There’s one two blocks away.’

      Grace exhaled. Her breath was shaky. ‘Too hard, Jeanne. This.’

      ‘Don’t give me that crap. You know drinking’s not the answer.’

      Grace took another unsteady breath and the dark thing in her mind slid back to where it lived.

      ‘You heard me, right?’

      ‘Tell me again all the reasons.’

      ‘Katie.’

      ‘That’s one.’

      ‘That’s five or six million, all bunched up together, Grace. That little girl is your only responsibility. That’s all that matters. Doing right by her.’

      ‘My only responsibility?’ Grace licked her lip. The ceiling had stopped moving, and she took a deeper breath. ‘Easy for you to say. You have alimony and a house in Mission Hills with a pool, and AA when you want to go slumming.’

      ‘An empty house, Grace, an ex-husband who would have gnawed off his own foot to get away, two kids who hate me, neighbors who talk about me behind my back, and yes, AA, but not when I want to go slumming.’ Jeanne stopped. ‘You okay now? You better?’

      ‘Yeah, I’m fine.’ She rolled on her side and took a deep shuddery breath, her eyes on the door, the door that led down the hall to Katie, that sweet bundle of laughter and darting energy, prickly feelings and blazing joy.

      ‘That’s it. I’m coming over.’ A click. Dial tone.

      ‘Thanks,’ Grace whispered.

      In her mind, she still heard the whispery voice, the silky question:

       Don’t you want to know what he’s going to do to you?

       Going to do to you?

       Going to do to you?

       FOUR

       Monday

      The CNN reporter had been following the taillights of a battered pickup truck for almost an hour as it headed into the Tohono O’odham Nation, a hundred miles of desert stretching from Arizona into Mexico. It was two in the morning, and stars spangled the night sky.

      Mac McGuire was traveling a road he’d taken half a dozen times, but a sudden rain the night before had cut gullies through it and left part of it a mire. He was relieved to have a guide.

      On the seat next to him Pete Hildebrand snoozed, a burly arm around the camera. Mac felt a flash of irritation. One day, the car would hit a bump and that camera would fly out of his arms and smack the dashboard like an egg. In back, Aaron Spense stretched out, arms crossed, wearing his dad’s Marine boots, iPod earbuds in his ears. Next to him lay a mixer in a tangle of cables and snarl of mikes. Aaron was twenty-two, Pete not much older. It made Mac feel tired. He was thirty-eight, his last birthday.

      Usually, CNN would have sent at least one producer, but Mac had insisted on keeping the size down, instinctively understanding that the fewer people pushing into their world, the greater likelihood he had of getting what he’d come for.

      He thought through how it was going to go, what he was going to say, where the overhead boom mike needed to be positioned, and when exactly he wanted Pete to come in close for a tight shot. The mechanics kept his mind off the shoot itself, how important this one was.

      Hekka Miasonkopna was a Yaqui Indian girl, three and a half years old, who was born with a damaged left ventricle. What had started as a piece about the nightmare of getting expensive cardiac care when poor had evolved into a series about the complexity of culture shaping worldview and the ferocity of a parent’s love.

      Hekka’s parents knew she would die. They accepted it. So it became Mac’s fight, for her. She was now in end-stage and would die without a transplant, something they’d resisted considering. There was another thing they could try. Something so new it was still in experimental trials. So new nobody in the media except Mac and his producers and video team even knew of its existence.

      His job was laying out the options and stepping back to record what happened next. Part of him came here wanting to nudge her parents into action, a move that was right at the edge of stepping over the line, and he knew it.

      He and his colleagues joked about the special hell reserved for reporters. Someplace where they’d be forced to sit for eternity with the hapless fools they’d talked into doing something – a giddy kid he’d once coached early in his career into getting a tattoo on camera came to mind; that one still gnawed at his conscience – and the problem was that even with the most altruistic of pieces, like this one, there existed a small part inside himself that was looking at it coldly, evaluating it not just for its emotional wallop but for its ability to be a Mac piece, helping him – just like that old American Express ad – go everywhere he wanted to go.

      Unlike local stations keyed to November sweeps, CNN tracked ratings all the time. TV viewing was higher in the fall, and Mac was working on two series simultaneously that would get big play: a graphic and disturbing one about child porn on the Internet that was close to being in the can, and this one with Hekka, culminating in her ground-breaking surgery and its aftermath.

      Providing they went for it. Or not. Either way, it was a story. He hated himself for even thinking that. Mac sincerely wanted her to live. He’d grown attached to the little girl and her family. But part of him, almost equally as strongly, knew if they chose to let her die, it would tug at the audience just as much.

      Horrible business, news. Someplace along the line, he’d sold part of himself and he couldn’t figure out how to get it back.

      Clouds of dust rose and seeped into his vehicle, making it look as if Arturo’s truck was floating in a puff of magic. Mac’s eyes burned. In the lights, the Coyote Mountains rose like an apparition of shaggy cliffs and granite bluffs.

      The pickup veered off road and Mac shifted into low, bumping across a dry riverbed. The Swiss Army knife on his key chain clinked like wind chimes.

      The mother was in his pocket; he knew that. She’d try anything to save her kid. The grandfather, Don Jose, was the challenge. Maybe he wasn’t even there anymore and it would make things easy. Somehow Mac doubted it. This one hadn’t been easy from the first.

      The land crumpled into arroyos of creosote bush and cactus. Bony cattle, picking their way among the scrub, flared in the lights and disappeared. Tin houses flashed and were gone.

      The truck slowed and disappeared over a rise and Mac followed. The hollow was pitch black, except for a lightbulb hanging over a wooden porch that outlined the sloping roof of a house. Moths banged into the light and an oak stood like a sleeping giant, one branch hanging low over the house.

      The truck cab opened and Arturo got out, with his long braids and dusty jeans, a younger version of his elderly father.