Security.

Brazaitis, Mark

THE DAY BEFORE Sonya was to leave for South Africa with her two-year-old son and sixteen-year-old stepdaughter, her husband said he had something important to discuss with her. It concerned Gia, whom he knew wouldn't be content to go to bed at eight every night with her half-brother or hang around the house to talk politics until midnight with her great-grandfather.

"She'll want to go into Cape Town with her cousins," Marcus said. "Since I won't be on the trip, I've hired her a bodyguard--a security guard--an armed escort--whatever he's called. He'll come at eight every night and stay on duty until one, which is the latest curfew Poppy would consider. I'm using the best agency in the country--Poppy agrees, by the way--but I want you to have a look at the man they send. Make sure he looks suitable."

Sonya was surprised by Marcus's concern for his daughter, who, for as long as Sonya had known her, slipped in and out of their house like a cat to whom Marcus paid only rare attention.

"What does suitable look like?" Sonya asked him.

"Make sure he looks like he'll protect her."

"Do you mean make sure he looks strong?"

"Listen," Marcus said, "I don't want this to come out the wrong way, but some agencies, even good agencies, are hiring blacks. Stop it. I know what you're going to say. But someone at the agency might remember Poppy's newspaper columns and his books and decide to punish him."

"By hurting Gia?"

"By sending someone who's unqualified, who won't feel the need to step in if a dangerous situation arises, who might even be a party to such a situation."

There was a pause, and Marcus looked her over. The first time he'd looked her over, his eyes had moved with the deliberateness of an elevator savoring every floor. "Never mind," he said, frowning, his gaze settling on something behind her. "Nothing will happen." He turned to her again and gave her a bright, reassuring smile. This was the familiar Marcus, confident the world would bless him. "Everything will be fine."

EXACTLY THREE MINUTES after Sonya, Jared, and Gia arrived at Richard's house via car service from Cape Town International Airport, the bodyguard or security specialist (Sonya refused to think of him as an "armed escort" because it conjured an image of a gigalo with a revolver) showed up to introduce himself, a day in advance of the start of his official duties. Damon was, to Sonya's guilty relief, white. His broad chest and bulging arm muscles were a contrast to his diminutive stature. If he was more than two inches taller than Sonya, who was five-five, she would have been surprised. But Marcus hadn't mentioned short stature as a disqualifying trait. Damon, who was from Durban, wore a short-sleeved, button-down white shirt, khakis, and black sunglasses. He showed everyone the pistol strapped to his right shin. He said he'd never had to fire it.

"I hope that doesn't mean you aren't prepared to," said Richard, who, at eighty-four years old, was an imposing man--more than six feet tall, with widow's peeks in his snow white hair. His skin color seemed like a sunset, pink in places, red in others, white across his forehead.

"On the contrary, sir," Damon replied. He removed his sunglasses and to Gia, who, despite having slept during most of the three flights and twenty-two hours of their trip, seemed about to tumble over with fatigue, said, "You'll have the safest vacation possible."

After Damon departed in his red-and-white hatchback with the Armed Response eagles on the hood, Richard gave them a tour of his house, then invited them into the dining room. It had tan walls and three ink drawings of lions in gold frames above the buffet. A black man who looked even older than Richard shuffled from the kitchen to the dining room bearing plates with spaghetti and meat sauce. "His wife's the cook," Richard explained after the man departed, "so keep your criticism of the food to yourself." Sonya caught a glimpse in the kitchen of a freckled, brown-skinned woman in a red kerchief. She reminded Sonya of her high school art teacher, who'd been the first adult aside from her mother to admire her paintings.

"Do they live here?" she asked him.

"In the detached room behind the kitchen," Richard said.

The room hadn't been part of Richard's tour.

"I've forgotten why Marcus couldn't come with you," Richard said.

"Worker discontent," Sonya answered, using Marcus' phrase. "They want a new contract and are threatening to strike." Marcus managed the factory his father owned outside of Sherman, Ohio. The factory manufactured aftermarket crash parts--hoods and doors and fenders. It was one of only two American factories to do so. There were dozens in Taiwan. "He's also exhausted," Sonya added, explaining how he'd overworked himself in the past six months to ensure the factory's compliance with new industry standards. "And it's been hard for him to get a decent night's sleep with Jared waking up at four most mornings."

"I didn't know Marcus needed sleep," Richard said sincerely. "When he visits me, he's like a perpetual motion machine, one which accelerates after midnight." He gave Sonya a warm smile and, nodding toward his great-grandson, who was blond like Marcus, said, "I hope the little rooster doesn't make you an involuntary insomniac during your holiday here."

Although Richard ate with obvious pleasure, Sonya and her two charges were more tired than hungry. By nine-thirty, they were asleep in the basement, Gia in one room and Sonya in another, with Jared in the portable crib at the end of her double bed.

Some time later, Sonya awoke in the dark. She thought to call Marcus' name but remembered her husband wasn't with her. She crawled to the end of the bed to check on Jared. In the glow from the blue nightlight, she saw he was sleeping on his back, his blanket wrapped around him like a wasp's nest. She left her bed and tiptoed past Gia's room to the carpeted stairwell. In the first-floor hallway, next to the front door, she stopped in front of a pad of numbers on the wall. If she moved another step, an alarm light would flash in the Cape Town offices of Armed Response and two of Damon's colleagues would be at the door within five minutes.

Richard had explained his security system even before he asked if Sonya or the children needed to use the bathroom. On the keypad, Sonya punched in four numbers. After a soft, mewing sound, she punched them in again. A green light flashed; she was free to walk around the house without a SWAT team being summoned.

There were four rooms on the main floor: the kitchen, the dining room, an office, and a large library whose east wall was a window. Marcus had said if she did nothing more than stand in front of this window, staring at the Twelve Apostles mountain range and the Atlantic Ocean, she would be glad she'd come. Now, however, she could see in the window only her own reflection: her straight black hair melting into her shoulders, her face so white it was as if she'd either seen a ghost or had become one.

Sonya drifted from the window to the bookshelves on her left. There were books on British and South African history as well as volumes on South African wildlife, flowers, and trees. In the right corner were the books Richard had written, which, in addition to collections of newspaper columns and volumes on South African politics, included four novels and a slim book of poems.

Sonya reached for Apartheid Today, Apartheid Tomorrow, Apartheid Forever. On the back of the dust jacket was a black-and-white photograph, in profile, of Richard from thirty-five years ago. He stood at the apex of a mountain, an ocean below him. His jet-black hair blew in the breeze; a cigarette dangled from his mouth. He looked like an aging but still handsome Hollywood actor.

A voice interrupted her gazing: "You've come fifteen years too late. Even if you agreed with every word I wrote, what difference might you, or anyone, make? The great Mandela would still be smiling from his god's perch in history and South Africa would still be a country of murderers, rapists, thieves, refugees, corrupt incompetents, and, saddest of all, AIDS."

Sonya said, "You surprised me."

"I'm sorry," Richard said. "I should have expected jetlag would leave you restless."

She told him, again, how she'd slept no more than an hour or two on the flight from Atlanta to Cape Town. "I don't know why I'm awake."

"Marcus should have booked you first class. He and his father are captains of industry, for God's sake, even if they're making their money on imitations of the real thing. In the art world, we'd call them forgers." Richard smiled. "Of course, I don't need to lecture you on the art world."

Sonya was a painter--she had been, anyway, before Jared was born. She'd met Marcus at an art show his factory sponsored at the Sherman Art Museum. At the show, Marcus bought five of her paintings. He said he would buy a sixth if she agreed to have dinner with him. Although he was handsome--blue eyes and a child-like, crooked grin--whatever attraction she felt toward him was initially superceded by gratitude. By buying her paintings, he'd bought her the next three months.

"Sit down, please," Richard said, and he gestured toward the couch at the end of the room. She put his book on the coffee table in front of the couch. Richard sat in an armchair across from her.

"I don't suppose you'd agree with more than five percent of what's in it," Richard said, nodding toward his book.

"I don't know," she said. Beginning to feel tired again, Sonya stifled a yawn. "I didn't have a chance to read it. Your novels look interesting."

"They share the concerns of Apartheid Today," he said. "In other words, they're relics of a mindset that has been, to put it gently, discredited."

Sonya nodded, although she was thinking of Marcus. She wondered if the labor situation at his factory might be resolved soon. (If this happened, Marcus promised he would join them in Cape Town, no matter how short his stay might be.) She wondered if Marcus had had a good night's sleep in their absence, with no wake-up call from the crib. At the same time, she asked herself, Why isn't he here?

"You probably think I'm a virulent racist," Richard said, "kin to the white-hood crowd down in Alabama and Mississippi."

"The Klan is everywhere," Sonya said. "I think there's a chapter, or whatever it's called, in Sheridan, which is thirty miles from Sherman." She felt angry, not at Richard, but first at Marcus, who'd convinced her that coming to South Africa with her toddler son and moody stepdaughter would be a rewarding adventure, and then at herself, for believing him.

"There's no disputing how much worse off this country is now than at any time under apartheid--for everyone," Richard said. "With refugees pouring in from all over Africa, and this ignorant government allowing them in, we have entire shantytown metropolises, where the chief industry is crime. And what has this government done about AIDS? Closed its eyes and said, 'If we can't see it, it doesn't exist.'"

Sonya wondered how she might excuse herself. Jared would be up soon; she found looking after him tiring enough when she was rested. "I don't know much about South Africa," she said. "But from what I've read and heard on TV, it's had a relatively smooth transition from white to black control."

"Oh, the transition was smooth all right. Saint Nelson had the world's eyes on him--and the developed world's wallet in his pocket. But with Saint Nelson off the stage, and the developed world's attention turned to terrorism and tsunamis, where is South Africa now? In an era of turmoil, destabilization, impending apocalypse. If you read my book closely"--he again nodded toward it--"you'll see I predicted it. In the tenth chapter, I speculate about what a black-run South African government would--and, especially, would fail to--do."

When Sonya yawned, she worried she might have offended Richard. And there was bite in his voice when he said: "You obviously need more sleep." In a softer tone, he added, "It's too early in the morning for a lecture." He gave her a quick smile, the wrinkles blooming on his face.

"I'd better sleep while I can," Sonya said. But then she heard Jared cry.

SONYA WOKE UP with a start, disoriented, dry-mouthed. She looked around, and ten seconds passed before she remembered where she was. She grabbed her wristwatch from the side table. It was eleven-fifteen, although she couldn't remember whether she'd set the watch to South African time. She crawled to the end of the bed and peered over the portable crib. Jared was gone.

As panic invaded her heart and riled up every nerve in her body, a memory came to calm her: Richard had volunteered to look after Jared while she caught up on her sleep. She'd imagined a catnap, half an hour, an hour at the most. She threw on a light summer dress and rushed upstairs.

Jared was sitting in the library on a couch next to Richard, who was showing him pictures in Wild Animals of South Africa. "Don't worry," Richard said, "I ignored his urgent request to have me read him one of my books. He remains innocent of his great-grandfather's recidivist ways."

What surprised Sonya was how comfortable Jared seemed on the couch, although after seeing her, he immediately rushed to her side.

"And your stepdaughter is in the garden," Richard said, as if Sonya might fail to ask. "Sunbathing." He looked at his watch. "She rose exactly sixteen minutes ago. Her breakfast consisted of a cup of coffee."

"Did Jared eat?" she asked, and Richard recited the menu.

After thanking him, Sonya stared out the window at the radiant January day. To her right, down the mountainside, the Atlantic Ocean was blue and inviting, although Sonya knew its waters were chilling. She turned her gaze to the bookshelf.

"You'll find my chapbook of poems the least detestable of anything I've written," Richard said. "They're mushy sonnets for Irene."

She was about to tell him she was sorry she'd never met his wife when the old black man shuffled in and announced, "Lunch is served."

Although she didn't say so, Sonya was disappointed in the lunch, which consisted of chicken, boiled potatoes, peas, and lychees, a fruit Gia described, under her breath, as "frog brains." In the home of a disgraced apartheid supporter, Sonya expected a sinful sumptuousness to the meals.

"Eat up, dear," Richard said, and Sonya, looking up from her plate, was about to reply when she saw he was speaking to Gia. Gia, whose height--she was four inches taller than Sonya--combined with her thinness and lime-sized breasts often gave her the gawky appearance of a twelve-year old, had eaten a bite or two of chicken and a few peas. Jared, meanwhile, had devoured most of what he'd been served.

When the old black man came to clear the table, Richard said, "Thank you, Jonah," and the old man mumbled a reply and disappeared into the kitchen.

"It's time for Jared's nap," Sonya said.

"And mine," Richard said.

Sonya led Jared to the basement bedroom, and after she'd changed his diaper, read to him, and put him in his crib, she lay on her bed, thinking she'd rest for ten minutes. She woke an hour later.

Upstairs, Sonya found Richard sitting in an armchair in his library, reading one of his novels. He uncrossed his legs and stood, holding the book in front of him. "I wanted to see if anything I'd ever written might appeal to someone who never knew the old South Africa and whose opinion of it has been influenced by pusillanimous politicians and sanctimonious sissies in the media. But their echoing voices, I fear, would drown in bluster and broadside what they couldn't defeat with reason." He gave her a quick smile, the lines deepest around his eyes. "On a sadder note, I can't find a single paragraph I'm proud of for its fine turn of phrase."

Sonya asked about Gia. Richard gestured outside. "Sunbathing again," he said.

"Is it safe?"

"The courtyard is surrounded by brick walls with electric wire on top. She's safer in my courtyard than anywhere but a nuclear bunker."

"I mean, the sun. Isn't it fierce here?"

Richard paused, as if to assess this new and unexpected enemy. "There are creams. We'll have to buy her some."

It wasn't clear whether Richard had napped, but he seemed refreshed, and presently he proposed going to the playground at Moullie Point, a stretch of oceanfront land to the west of his house.

After Jared woke up, they climbed into Richard's 1975 BMW and wove down the mountain, passing house after house on whose gates were attached bold-colored metal signs: Guardian Security, Peaceforce Security, Cosmopolitan Security, Armed Response. There was no beach at Moullie Point, which disappointed Gia, who retired to a bench to look at her fingernails. There was, however, a swing set, a seesaw, a slide. Further down was a putt-putt golf course, a miniature version of the Johannesburg-to-Cape Town Blue Train, and what was billed as "The World's Third Largest Maze," made of tall shrubbery. Jared wanted to ride the Mini Blue Train, and Richard volunteered to go with him. Jared could fit into the tiny compartment easily, but Sonya thought Richard would break his back as he contorted his body to squeeze inside. He sat across from Jared, his head touching the roof of the train car.

The train jerked to a start and headed in the direction of the playground before looping toward the ocean. On its return, it passed through a twenty-foot tunnel. It completed the route a second time before stopping. "Again!" Jared shouted from his seat.

"I don't know if Poppy wants to go again," Sonya said, but Richard said, "I doubt I could get out now if I tried." So Sonya paid ten rand for two more tickets and they rode again.

"Where's Gia?" Richard asked at the completion of the second trip, and Sonya gestured behind her.

"Please have her come near us. It's reckless of us to keep her at such a distance."

As Richard and Jared rode the Blue Train a third time, Sonya called Gia over to her. "Oh, please," Gia said after Sonya explained the possible danger. "Like anyone is going to kidnap me."

After they'd returned home and eaten dinner, Damon arrived, his casual outfit similar to what he'd worn the day before. Sonya scanned down his pant leg but failed to notice his gun. Gia, who'd sat sullen and uncommunicative at the dinner table before slipping off to her room, emerged from the basement in her evening attire. If Sonya had been her mother, she might have insisted she return to her wardrobe and see if she could find actual clothes. Richard said, "Half of a woman's beauty is the mystery of it. I'm afraid you're spoiling the game." If Gia understood or even heard her great-grandfather's words, she didn't acknowledge them.

To Damon, Richard said, "I spoke with her cousins, which is how we're defining their complicated familial relationship, and they said they'd be meeting in Camp's Bay, at the Ice Cream Emporium." Richard smiled. "I hope the meeting place wasn't chosen solely to appeal to my sense of nostalgia."

"They make excellent ice cream," Damon said agreeably.

"Midnight," Richard told Damon. "One in the morning at the absolute latest."

Damon appeared to give an abbreviated bow, like a butler, and Sonya found the gesture so comical she wondered if it was sincere.

Damon turned and followed Gia out the door.

"He has a cell phone," Richard said. "I'll be calling it every half hour."

Sonya thought to laugh, but she stopped when she realized Richard was serious.

"Gia's cousins have an armed escort as well," he added.

Sonya excused herself to bathe Jared and put him to bed. When she returned upstairs, Richard was sitting in his armchair, a glass in his hand. "Would you like a drink?" he asked.

She'd given up drinking when she was pregnant. But she decided she could benefit from a buzz. "Thank you," she said. "I'll have what you're having."

Richard rose and poured her a gin and tonic. After only three sips, she could feel her mind begin to lift from her body like a hot air balloon from the earth.

"You've probably wondered why I can't admit I was wrong," Richard said from the armchair, "why I can't accept the verdict, the end of apartheid, the rise of a new South Africa. You probably wonder if I am holding on to my beliefs out of a stubborn and desperate effort to prove I do not deserve to be called one of history's fools."

Richard looked at her, although she wasn't sure he expected a reply. She leaned back on the couch before bending forward to pick up her drink from the coffee table. "Under apartheid," he resumed, "South Africa was clean. It was safe to walk the streets at night. Our facilities and infrastructure, from hospitals to highways, were top of the line. Now, as everything crumbles--literally, in some cases--I must live in a fortress and hire a $3000-a-week bodyguard so my great-granddaughter can spend a few evenings at a disco. Blacks who have any money and any sense also live in their own prisons. And whites and blacks too poor to afford to protect themselves soon enough recognize the price of this so-called liberty."

Sonya finished her drink, stunned by how fast it had disappeared. She wondered if Richard would offer her another. She wondered why Marcus hadn't called. She wondered what Gia was doing and tried to imagine her dancing. But Sonya could only picture her seated, twirling the straw in her Sprite, staring without interest or affection at people on the dance floor or at the gaudy artwork on the walls.

Richard reached for her glass. "Another?"

"Please," she said, hearing the eagerness in her voice.

Richard didn't stand immediately. "Is it a condemnable offense to say that apartheid offered a better life for the majority of South Africans, black and white--especially if the AIDS epidemic is considered--when the facts clearly demonstrate this? Is it equally condemnable to suggest that a return to such a life, even a modified return to such a life, would be preferable to this march toward chaos and extinction?

"No matter what the country, no matter what the government, there will always be people with power and people without power, people who decide and people who must abide by the decisions, people in a position to be benevolent and people who are dependent on their benevolence. The former group will always be a minority. In South Africa, we merely formalized this essential truth. We gave it a name, we defined its rules, and our honesty of nomenclature, even more than the shortcomings of our system--and I'll admit there were regrettable incidents--inspired the world's outrage."

Sonya remembered how her high school art teacher had once required her to draw a still life, of pears and pomegranates, with her left hand. "It will be like learning another language," her teacher said. "It will teach you to value your own." Sonya didn't know what she meant until the next week, when she painted the same pears and pomegranates, this time with her right hand. How much more precise, detailed, and vibrant this painting was than anything she'd painted before.

What if she'd been forced to live her life left-handed?

"It's unfair to give all the power to a single race," Sonya said.

"But this is precisely the situation we have now!" Richard exclaimed.

"It's a democracy," Sonya countered--weakly, she suspected.

"It's despotism masquerading as democracy. Enlightenment and benevolence have been overthrown in favor of greed, incompetence, and outright criminality. South Africa used to be the jewel of the continent. Now it's only another overpopulated, disease-ridden, crime-infested backwater--poverty's final African conquest."

Sonya thought about the apartments in East Cleveland where she, her mother, and her brother lived after her father died, how several of them had been broken into, how in the room she and her mother had shared in one she could hear the high-pitched celebratory squeal of rats as they investigated the garbage left out for pick up the next morning. She thought about the money she didn't have when it came time to pay her junior-year tuition at Ohio Eastern University and the student loans she hadn't applied for because she couldn't imagine ever being able to repay them. She thought about the six years she worked as a waitress before she met Marcus.

In retrospect, her life before Marcus seemed like a perpetual tightrope walk above catastrophe, although she'd managed to keep painting. In light of her recent inactivity, she wondered if she'd painted because of, rather than in spite of, her circumstances.

After a pause, Richard stood, refreshed his drink, and made her another. "Well," he said, handing her her glass. "I think it's time we checked up on Gia."

He stepped out of the room to make the call. When he returned, he said, "They're at a club, something with shark in the name. Our friend Damon is keeping a close eye on her." Remembering Gia's outfit, Sonya thought, I bet.

A few minutes later, after she'd finished her drink and before Richard could settle on another topic, she said goodnight. Richard said he planned to stay up until Gia's return.

THE NEXT AFTERNOON, Marcus called as Sonya was napping. Richard said he hadn't wanted to wake her. Marcus, he said, would call back. When by ten o'clock, he hadn't, she phoned him at home. It was Sunday, three in the afternoon in Sherman, and she was hoping to catch him watching golf or strumming his electric guitar. When she heard his cheerful, inviting voice say, "Leave a message at the beep," she remembered him saying a man's voice should always be on the answering machine in order to deter would-be rapists and thieves.

She tried his cell phone, although he often turned it off on weekends, and reached only his voice mail. She left the same skeptical message: "Hello, sweetheart, are you there? Marcus? Marcus, are you there?"

THEIR SUBSEQUENT DAYS in Cape Town followed the pattern of their first full day, at least for Sonya, Jared, and Richard. Jared never tired of the playground or the Blue Train. They'd traveled halfway around the world, yet Jared was most interested in doing what they could have done, with slight variation, at the Sky Lake Mall in Sherman.

For her part, Gia rarely rose before noon, and after lunch, she liked to sunbathe in the courtyard. From a distance, with her height and thinness, Gia was striking, but up close, her face was too narrow (and four unflattering freckles surrounded her nose like corners of a picture frame) and her short black hair seemed too flat, as if it was painted on her scalp.

At meals, Gia answered questions about her previous night's activities with "It was cool," which is about all Sonya had ever heard her say of anything related to her life. She never mentioned her mother, who lived with a boyfriend in Mexico. As far as Sonya knew, Gia never saw or heard from her.

OVER LUNCH ONE DAY, Richard suggested they all go to Duiker Island, on the Indian Ocean side of the Cape, the following morning to see the seals. Gia, however, balked at rising before noon, no matter what they might see. Richard grudgingly agreed to let her stay behind, but insisted she remain in the house until they returned. He also had her memorize the Armed Response phone number.

The next morning, Sonya, Richard, and Jared left the house at eight and were on a ferry in Hout Bay Harbour by nine-thirty. They had good seats, on the port side, and when the ferry neared Duiker Island, which was no more than a collection of rocks, it slowed to allow the fifty or so passengers a view of the seals. There were hundreds of them, some in the water, most lolling on the rocks. Their habitat reeked of feces.

"Who made the stink?" Jared asked, holding his nose.

The ferry moved on, passing a wrecked ship, the U.S. flag painted on the hull, before turning around and giving the ferry's passengers another look at the seals. Sonya wasn't prone to sea-sickness, but the terrible smell from Duiker Island, combined with the ferry's slow rocking, made her nauseous. At last, the ferry broke free of the island, and Sonya pulled in a few deep, clean breaths to ease her stomach.

A minute later, Richard pointed to something in the water. Sonya saw the shark only as a fin and a dark shadow beneath the surface.

"It's lunchtime," Richard said, "and the seals of Duiker Island are today's special."

"They'd better call Armed Response," Sonya said.

"Who had better?"

"The seals," she said.

There was a silence. "Oh, I see," he said. "You're having a joke." She was surprised to find him so humorless.

In the middle of the boat was a large map of South Africa, which highlighted the country's beaches and wineries as well as the island prison where Nelson Mandela had lived for more than two decades.

"I assume you think I'm unduly frightened," Richard said, "someone who sees danger everywhere."

Sonya did think Richard was terrified of blacks coming to kill him because of what he'd written. But she couldn't say whether his fear was unrealistic.

"A seal!" Jared said, and he stood on his seat and leaned over the rail. "Look! Look!" he shouted, and Sonya saw it all in a flash: Jared toppling over the rail and into the water, the ferry motoring on, her diving into the warm water but too late to save him.

She grabbed him and sat him on her lap. "Sit down, Jared. You scared me."

"But a seal, mommy. A seal!" he exclaimed, as if he hadn't seen a thousand seals five minutes ago.

Even after the ferry docked, Sonya's heart was thundering against her chest.

On their drive back to Richard's house, Jared played with the straps of his car seat, and Richard talked about other wildlife on the Cape. Sonya looked out the window, at the beautiful houses and their iron gates and barbed wire. She wondered if their owners were like Richard, at once nostalgic and apocalyptic.

Sonya remembered when, having dated Marcus for a year, she'd become convinced he wasn't serious about her. He was a decade-and-a-half older than she was, but despite his important job and the factory he stood to inherit, he seemed as carefree and ungrounded as the boys she'd dated in college.

One night, she left her diaphragm in her medicine cabinet because she was afraid she might be sixty years old and still waiting tables at the Three O'Clock Cafe, still hoping to have a show of her art in a gallery in Cleveland or Columbus. When she discovered she was pregnant, she was furious at herself, at how she'd allowed her insecurity and fear to make her stupid and rash. She was sure Marcus would insist on an abortion.

But when she told him she was pregnant, his enthusiasm was like fireworks: "We'll get married before the day's over." And as if once having conceived the thought he had to act on it lest it drown in the sweet waters of other distractions and delights, they did marry the same day, at the Sherman Courthouse, with Gia, looking suspicious and bored, standing with them.

Half a mile from Richard's house, an Armed Response car passed them in the oncoming lane. Sonya was about to ask Richard if he'd had a look at the driver, but he was on to another subject and she decided she had imagined Damon behind the wheel.

When they returned to Richard's house, Gia was awake, but she'd obviously risen only recently because she was showering in the basement bathroom. Presently, Richard's two black servants arrived from their room behind the kitchen and noiselessly began to prepare lunch.

When Gia came upstairs to eat, Richard clapped his hands and said, "Good. We all survived the morning."

After lunch, Sonya put Jared in his crib to nap. She fell onto her bed and closed her eyes. She saw seals lounging on their island and lolling in the water around it. She saw the shark swimming out to rupture their world.

Jared woke her with his babbling. After she changed him and brought him upstairs, Richard told her Marcus had called again. "He says he's sorry. He keeps forgetting about the time change, and so every time he lifts the phone to call, it's three in the morning here. He's busy now, but he'll call tomorrow."

"I don't believe him," she muttered, and she had a vision of her and Jared on a rowboat, in the middle of a vast sea. For the moment it remained in her mind, the image was so clear she could have painted it.

THE NEXT DAY, Sonya coaxed Jared out of a visit to the Blue Train with a promise of ice cream. At the Ice Cream Emporium, Jared ate twice what his mother managed and ten times what his half-sister deigned to nibble. Only Richard had a comparable appetite. Afterwards, they walked to the beach at Camp's Bay. Gia lounged on a beach towel, reading Glamour and Elle, while Sonya held Jared's hands as he ran in and out of the cold, crashing waves. Richard watched them all from under a palm tree in a fold-up chair. He looked too elegant to be a Secret Service agent, but he wore the sunglasses--and the tense look--of one.

Back at Richard's house, Sonya called Marcus, first at home, then on his cell phone, then at work, where she reached his assistant, who said she'd leave him a message. "I've left messages," Sonya snapped and hung up.

"I'll get a hold of him for you," Richard said with irritation. "I'll call his father if I have to."

"He'll call back," Sonya replied doubtfully.

Half an hour later, however, Marcus did call. He fired questions at her with his usual enthusiastic impatience: "How's Jared? How's Gia? How's Poppy? How are you holding up? Did you have a look out Poppy's library window? Isn't it beautiful? Have you been in the ocean? It's damn cold, isn't it? Is Gia having fun? Does the bodyguard Poppy hired look rough and tough enough?"

This was his conversational style, the rush of his words an exhilarating ride. When she handed the phone to Richard, she was smiling.

Richard, however, didn't appear as easily thrilled. He spoke to Marcus in a monotone and without anything resembling humor. Only at the end of the conversation did Richard seem to lighten: "Yes, we are having adventurous adventures and seeing wonderful wonders. And, yes, doubtless they would be even more adventurous and wonderful if you were here."

DURING THE NEXT several days, they ate ice cream and played on the beach. But on the afternoon of their last full day in the country, at Jared's insistence, they returned to Moullie Point. Instead of heading toward the Blue Train, however, Jared veered toward the World's Third Largest Maze. "Ride this ride!" he announced.

The man behind the counter at the maze's entrance looked like he'd made a living playing mad scientists in movies. Sonya was worried his wild white hair, cataract-infected blue eyes, and prison-camp-like gauntness would frighten Jared, but Jared seemed determined to go forward. When the man turned to Richard, he said, "I see an emissary from the old regime."

"May I assume I'm not alone in mourning it?" asked Richard, who didn't wait for the man's reply before questioning him about whether there was more than a single entrance and exit to the maze.

"The only way in is the only way out and vice versa," the man declared.

Richard declined to go in. "I'll stand guard with Gia." But Gia stepped past her great-grandfather. "What the hell," she added, the loudest words she'd spoken during the entire trip.

The maze's ten-foot hedges were haphazardly trimmed, as if by a blind person, and its grass was shin high in places, absent in others. A dozen feet into the maze, the path forked. When Jared and Sonya committed to a direction, Gia chose the other route. From the outside, the maze didn't look large, and Sonya thought its wild-haired proprietor had been exaggerating when he said it would take twenty minutes to navigate. But inside, she had a different view of its complexity.

Sonya followed Jared around the maze's outer edge. At one point, she peered into the hedges and saw, between a screen of leaves, the ocean, crashing relentlessly against the rocks. A moment later, her view of ocean and rocks was obstructed by a muscular white man dressed in a white shirt and khakis. Leaves blocked her view of his face. Damon? she was about to ask, but the man stepped out of her sight. She was glad she hadn't spoken. She was beginning to see Damon, the roving protector, everywhere, and she worried what this said about her.

Because Jared was intent on returning to the same dead-ends and the same overgrown garden and splinter-filled bench in the middle of the maze, it took them twenty-five minutes to find their way to the exit. Even so, they beat Gia. Five minutes passed, then ten.

"I think it's time we called her," Richard said. At first, their voices were barely louder than their speaking voices. But soon, they were shouting.

"Maybe she met up with the prince of the labyrinth and they're walking down the wedding aisle as we speak," the maze's proprietor said.

"Were you telling the truth about there being only one exit?" Richard asked, anger and worry in his voice.

"If you follow the paths, there is only one exit," he said. "If you fly like a bird or dig like a worm--or if you crash through the hedges like an animal in heat--there are other exits."

When Richard stepped toward the man, Sonya thought he might hit him. Instead, he said, "Your little jokes are insulting."

"My apologies, my dear man," said the proprietor, fluttering his eyelashes.

Presently, Gia strolled out of the maze like someone being paid to walk with lazy deliberation. Yet Sonya noticed the flush in Gia's cheeks; she noticed two scratches on her neck. She thought Gia might have found herself lost and frustrated; in her growing panic to find the exit, she might have crashed through hedges.

"I couldn't find the way out," Gia said. There was nothing sincere in her tone, and Sonya, contradicting her first impression, now thought Gia had purposely taken so long in order to scare them.

"Well, that was a cruel trick, leaving us worried like that," Richard said. "But the joke's over and no one had a heart attack."

"Yet," added the maze's proprietor.

Richard ignored him, and they walked to the playground to make use of the remaining daylight.

BECAUSE OF THEIR early flight the next day, Gia had had to say goodbye to her cousins and her bodyguard the previous night. On their return to Richard's house, however, Gia lobbied her great-grandfather for one more night on the town. With more feeling than Sonya had ever seen her display, she said, "Damon told me he'd be available to work tonight. He said he'd hold open his spot until I talked to you. Please, Poppy. Please?"

"I told Damon and his agency that I would be requiring their services only through last night," Richard said, "and I have absolutely no intention of changing my mind."

After eating a few bites of her dinner, Gia walked down to her bedroom in an angry retreat and didn't return upstairs until morning.

Anxious about the return trip, Sonya didn't eat much more than Gia. After putting Jared down for the night, she walked upstairs to the library, where Richard handed her a gin and tonic. As they sat down, he said, "During your stay with me, I see I haven't persuaded you even a step toward my way of thinking."

Sonya sighed. She was tired, a tiredness different in quality than the exhaustion she'd arrived with. It was a tiredness flamed by worry, an uneasiness whose cause she couldn't pinpoint. "I'm not very political," she told Richard. "If I had been living here during apartheid, I wouldn't have been marching in the streets or getting arrested. I would have been painting seascapes and gardens. So I don't stand on high moral ground. But someone who defends apartheid now, with whatever statistics and stories ... well, it's insulting to the people who suffered so much."

"Someone will always suffer--it's the human way."

"I agree with you, Richard. But no one should choose to make another person suffer. There's suffering enough without your help."

Richard frowned, almost invisibly. "As you might expect, I have arguments to make in my defense," he said. "But I think it would be best to allow my guest the last word." He smiled, lifted his glass, and drank.

Although Sonya was prepared to go on, she was relieved she wouldn't have to. Beneath her relief she rediscovered her weariness. "I'm sorry, Richard, but I think I need to call it a night. I have a long day ahead of me tomorrow, and it'll seem twice as long if Jared is awake again during the entire trip."

"I understand," he said, rising.

There was an awkward moment in which Sonya didn't know how to leave him. Their custom, a simple "Goodnight," didn't seem sufficient. While she detested his politics, she admired his honesty; he doubtless knew she would never be sympathetic to his views, but he hadn't tried to protect her from them. In this, she found being with him reassuring, like walking a well-known, well-lighted path.

She stepped over to him, hugged him, and gave him a swift kiss on the cheek. It seemed he wanted to say something else, but for the first time since her arrival, he fumbled over words. In the end, he offered her a wave, his right hand trembling.

MARCUS DIDN'T PICK Sonya, Gia, and Jared up at the Sherman Airport as he'd promised; Shelly, his assistant, met them instead. Nor was Marcus home when they arrived. It was Friday, six o'clock in the evening, and after putting Jared down for a nap--he'd slept a total of four hours and seventeen minutes on their return trip--Sonya walked around the house, noting, as in what struck her as a premonition realized, the missing furniture: the couch from their basement den, the bed from their guestroom. She tried to temper her anxiety and anger by imagining Marcus in the midst of a refurnishing project, but she found herself periodically falling to her knees and crying. Marcus didn't answer his cell phone. Gia, meanwhile, had left the house minutes after their return.

By the time Marcus arrived five hours later, Sonya had had a nap, and although she felt far from rested, she didn't feel like crying anymore. Sonya's first impression of Marcus was how, in his below-average stature as well as in his careful choice of casual clothes, he resembled not his grandfather but Damon.

"What the hell is going on?" she asked.

"I want a divorce," he replied with the good humor of someone ordering an appetizer.

Although she had anticipated these exact words, and even his casual tone, they had the force of a punch. She gathered in a breath. "So there's another woman?"

"She's older than you," he said, as if this might help her understand or assuage her jealousy. "She runs her family's Nissan dealership on Airport Avenue. She's my peer, you could say, someone who knows my business. I think I've finally grown up." He added, "I'm sorry. I'm a terrific asshole."

He agreed with every insult she screamed at him.

When she'd run out of words, her anger giving way to a wave of exhaustion and vertigo, he asked her if Gia could remain at the house. "I'd hate to have to uproot her in the middle of her junior year, when she needs to get serious about college," he said. "It'll be only until the end of the school year, in June." After a pause, and as if in response to a question she hadn't asked but had meant to, he said, "Springtime."

ON THE ADVICE of one of her former art professors, whom she called because she didn't know whom else to call, Sonya hired a lawyer, but the lawyer produced bad news: Marcus owned no share in his father's factory. He had only his general manager's salary, which was $45,000 a year, and a one-tenth ownership in a racehorse in New Jersey. George and Melinda, Sonya remembered, had paid for their Caribbean honeymoon.

"You'll receive child support and alimony, of course," the lawyer said. "And since he has vacated the house, I would imagine he'll concede all interest in it to you. The mortgage is obviously steep, but ..."

Sonya's mother, who lived in Arizona, didn't have a job; sometimes Sonya's stepfather didn't either. Her brother lived in Montana and was sporadically employed in the timber industry.

"I will, of course, do all I can to get you every penny the bastard owes you," the lawyer said.

"His father knew he couldn't be trusted," Sonya said as if she'd made this revelation long ago. "If he'd put even a third of the factory in Marcus's name, he knew it would be gone in a paternity suit or divorce."

She thought she would have to leave Sherman. If she didn't, she would find herself waiting tables at the Three O'Clock Cafe or standing behind the counter at one of the novelty stores downtown. Inevitably, she'd have to serve Marcus or Marcus's lover or both.

She called George because he'd always been nice to her, more so than Melinda, anyway, but even before she'd spoken a dozen words, he cut her off: "At this point, Sonya, it's best to let the lawyers handle the situation."

IN THE HOUSE, Gia was as reclusive as always. She never ate meals at the same time as Sonya. Instead, she picked at the leftovers in the refrigerator like a mouse.

On occasion, Sonya would hear, pounding from within Gia's room, music that sounded like a scream. Inside her bedroom, Gia could have been shooting heroin or fucking a boy's brains out. But Sonya thought that if she opened the door, she would find Gia gazing out a window at the troubled world.

Some days, Sonya didn't see or hear Gia at all.

THREE AND A-HALF months after Sonya returned from South Africa, she awoke at three in the morning because Jared had cried out from his crib. Although Jared fell back to sleep, Sonya knew she wouldn't be able to. She put a bathrobe on over her nightgown and walked down the stairs to the kitchen, where she poured herself a glass of milk. She looked at the green numbers on the clock on the microwave and added seven hours.

Sonya had thought from time to time of calling Richard, although she didn't know what she hoped to gain by it. Even if he sympathized with her, even if he acknowledged the wrongs Marcus had done her, she doubted he could convince his grandson he was making a mistake, though because Richard had been forthright with her, she would confess to him her willingness to take Marcus back. What she wouldn't admit: She wanted to hold on to her marriage at least long enough for Marcus, or his parents, to pay for her to finish college. She would change her major to something practical, like nursing.

She dialed the strange prefix and the number. The phone rang twice before a voice unfamiliar to her, a deep, African voice, said, "Who is this, please?"

"This is Sonya, Sonya Gordon--Richard's granddaughter, his granddaughter-in-law. I was hoping to speak to him."

"I'm sorry. He died two weeks ago Monday."

"I don't understand," she said.

A pause. "My grandmother said he didn't have the same appetites lately. She said he became like a spider's web, poised to catch whatever sickness might fly toward him. He died of pneumonia."

It was difficult to imagine Richard, who ate and drank with such pleasure, lacking an appetite. But she pictured him as he'd been on her last night in Cape Town, pictured his quivering wave. What did he want from our talks? she wondered. Only to justify his past? Or to repel me so that when we left, he wouldn't feel he was losing anything he hadn't already lost?

"Did Richard's family--his son and his grandson, my husband, I mean--come to the funeral?"

Sonya knew her question must have seemed strange to the man on the phone, but he answered it politely: "His two nieces came from Cape Town and other relatives came from Johannesburg. But his son didn't come. No one came from the States."

Why? she wanted to ask, although she thought she knew the answer: Because when Richard learned what Marcus had done to me, he told them- Well, she thought, it isn't impossible.

Intending to be polite, she asked, "Have you been hired to look after the house until it's sold?"

There was a pause before he said, "I am Jonah and Beauty's grandson. Richard left his house to them, and I am helping them make it theirs."

Jonah and Beauty. The names were, at first, unfamiliar to her. But she recalled an old black man shuffling into Richard's dining room and an old black woman with freckles and a red kerchief lowering dirty plates into water frothing with soapsuds. Jonah and Beauty. In her week-and-a-half in South Africa, she hadn't said more than "Thank you" to either of them.

Did he leave the house to them out of guilt? Or were they the last friends he had?

She asked, "Did you work in Richard's house too?"

The man laughed. "I'm a lawyer in Cape Town. But growing up, I spent many afternoons with my grandparents. I liked Richard very much--until I was old enough to read. And even then, I never hated him."

As if they were sitting across the table from each other, she nodded. She said goodbye, hung up, and burst into tears.

IN THE MIDDLE of June, a day or two after Gia's school year finished, Sonya pulled open the door of her second-floor bathroom and found Gia standing naked in front of the full-length mirror beside the sink, one of the billowy cotton dresses she'd taken to wearing since the weather had turned warm in a pile beside her. Gia glanced at Sonya before turning her gaze back to her reflection. She was cradling, with both hands, her rounded belly, the protrusion incongruous with Gia's small breasts and Popsicle-stick-thin legs. Her face was contorted, as if from disbelief or shame.

Sonya pictured Damon behind the wheel of his Armed Response car, behind the leaves of the World's Third Largest Maze. She knew how far along Gia was--too far to stop it.

"I know who he is," Sonya said, her eyes fixed on Gia's swollen belly. "Have you contacted him?"

"I talked to him once," Gia said, collapsing onto the tile floor. She began to cry, her body shaking, her emotion, in someone usually so withdrawn, shocking to see. "But the next time I called, the agency said he'd quit and had gone back to Durban. He knows my phone number. I keep waiting."

She turned to Sonya, her face damp, red, and full of anguish. "What will happen to me?"

Sonya kneeled beside Gia and placed Gia's hands between her own. Gia dropped her head onto Sonya's shoulder; her body trembled against Sonya's body.

I'll take care of you, Sonya thought to say. She listened to Gia's crying diminish. She listened to the silence. And still, she couldn't say anything. She couldn't lie.