Hard News

was the reason she’d been shot and Rune wanted to steer clear of that. Not that she was racked with guilt—you could also say that Claire got hurt because she’d abandoned her daughter. But
that
got into the way gods or fate or nature worked and if you started thinking too much about cause and effect, Rune knew, it’d drive you nuts.
    There was silence for a minute. Then Rune said, “I bought Court a new dress.” Nodding at the little girl.
    “Look, Mommy.”
    Claire twisted her body as far as she could so the un-bandaged eye got a good look at the dress, and the way the young woman’s damaged face blossomed with love as she looked at her little girl clearly answered the single scorching question that had been consuming Rune since Claire had returned.
    When she considered it now, of course, she realized there really had never been any chance that Courtney could stay with her and she was mad at herself for hoping things might turn out otherwise. After all, she’d read
The Snow Princess
. She knew how it ended. This business about fairy stories having happy endings—that was bullshit. Sometimes people melt. People go away. People die. And we’re left with the stories and the memories, which, if we’re lucky, will be good stories and good memories and then we get on with our life.
    Claire was reaching forward, awkwardly, across the bed with her good arm, saying, “Did you miss me, honey?”
    “Uh-huh.” Courtney let go of Rune’s hand and tried to climb onto the bed. Rune boosted her up.
    Rune said, “So you’re going back to Boston, huh? The two of you?”
    Claire said, “Yeah, like, we’ll live at my mom’s until I can get some money saved up but apartments are cheap there. It shouldn’t take me much time.”
    Fight it….
    Rune swallowed. “You want, I can keep Courtney with me until you get settled. We’re pretty good buddies, huh?”
    The little girl was playing with the dinosaur and didn’t hear what Rune said. Or didn’t want to. In any case she didn’t answer. Claire shook her head. “I kind of want her with me. You know how it is.”
    “Sure.”
    “Look, Rune, I never said it but I like really, really appreciate what you did. It was a pretty bad thing, just leaving like that. A lot of people wouldn’t have done what you did.”
    “True, they wouldn’t,” Rune said.
    “I owe you.”
    “Yeah, you do. You owe me.”
    “The doctor says I can be transferred to Boston in a couple of days. And, guess what?”
    Rune’s face burned. “A couple of days?”
    “I’m gonna take an ambulance, like, the whole way. Is that cool, or what? My mom’s paying for it.”
    And with that Rune realized it was no good fighting it anymore. She’d lost. She took a deep breath and said, “Well, ciao, you guys.”
    “Aw, come on,” Claire said, “stay for a while. Check out the doctors. There’s this cute one. Curly hair you won’t believe.”
    Rune shook her head and started for the door.
    “Rune,” Courtney said suddenly, “can we go to the zoo?”
    Pausing to hug the girl briefly, she managed, somehow, to keep her voice steady and to hold back the tears for the time it took her to say, “Before you leave, honey, we’ll go to the zoo. I promise.”
    Rune remained steady and calm for the few seconds it took her to say this and walk out the door.
    But not an instant longer. And as Rune walked down the corridor toward the exit the tears streamed fast and the quiet sobbing stole her breath as if she were being swept away, drowning and numb, in a torrent of melting snow.
    “ LOOK AT THIS. LIKE A DAMN DRAGON BURNED ME OUT. ”
    Piper Sutton looked at her. “You and your dragons.”
    They stood on the pier, where the glistening, scorched hull of the houseboat floated, hardly bobbing, in the oily water of the Hudson.
    Rune bent down and picked up a soggy dress. She examined the cloth. The collar was a little scorched but she might be able to cover it up with paint. She thought about the lawyer, Fred Megler, an expert at repairing clothes with pens.
    But she sniffed the dress, shrugged and threw it into the discard pile, which looked like a small volcano of trash. Both the fire and the water from the NYFD had taken their toll. On the deck was a pile of books, pots and pans, some half-melted running shoes, drinking glasses. Nothing really valuable had survived, only the Motorola TV and the wrought-iron frames of the butterfly chairs.
    “The 1950s were indestructible,” Rune said, nodding at