Intensity

admitting that she had been essentially motherless since birth and always would be motherless, and with her only close friend lying dead in Edgler Vess's motor home, Chyna wished that she knew her father's name, that she had at least once seen his face. Her mother's maiden name was Shepherd; she had never been married. "Be glad you're illegitimate, baby," Anne had said, "because that means you're free . Little bastard children don't have as many relatives clinging like psychic leeches and sucking away their souls." Over the years, when Chyna had asked about her father, Anne had said only that he was dead, and she had been able to say it dry-eyed, even light-heartedly. She wouldn't provide details of his appearance, discuss what work he'd done, reveal where he'd lived, or acknowledge that he'd had a name. "By the time I was pregnant with you," Anne once said, "I wasn't seeing him any more. He was history. I never told him about you. He never knew."
        Chyna liked to daydream about him sometimes: She imagined that her mother had lied about this, as about so many things, and that her dad was alive. He would be a lot like Gregory Peck in To Kill a Mockingbird , a big man with gentle eyes, soft-spoken, kind, quietly humorous, with a keen sense of justice, certain of who he was and of what he believed. He would be a man who was admired and respected by other people but who thought himself no more special than anyone else. He would love her.
        If she had known his name, either first or last, she would have spoken it now, aloud. The mere sound of her father's name would have comforted her.
        She was crying. Through the many hours since she had come under Vess's thrall, she had felt tears welling more than once, and she had repressed them. But she couldn't dam this hot flood. She despised herself for crying-but only briefly. These bitter tears were a welcome admission that there was no hope for her. They washed her free of hope, and that was what she wanted now, because hope led only to disappointment and pain. All her troubled life, since at least her eighth birthday, she had refused to weep freely, really let loose with tears. Being tough and dry-eyed was the only way to get respect from those people who, on seeing the smallest weakness in another, got a fearful muddy fight in their eyes and closed in like jackals around a gazelle with a broken leg. But withholding tears wouldn't fend off the jackal who had promised to be back after midnight, and a lifetime of grief and hurt burst from her. Great wet sobs shook Chyna so hard that her chest began to ache worse than her neck or her sprained finger. Her throat soon felt hot and raw. She sagged in her clinking chains, in her imprisoning chair, face clenched and streaming and hot, stomach clenched and cold, the taste of salt in her mouth, gasping, groaning in despair, choking on the smothering awareness of her terrible solitude. She shuddered uncontrollably, and her hands spasmed into frail fists but then opened and grasped at the air around her head as if her anguish were a cowl that might be torn off and cast aside. Profoundly alone, unloved and lost, she spiraled down into a mental mirror maze without even her father's name for comfort.
        After a while, an engine roared. She heard the brassy toot of a horn: two short blasts and then two more.
        Chyna lifted her head, looked through the nearby window, and saw the headlights of a car leaving the barn. Her vision was blurred by tears. She couldn't see the car itself as it sped past the house in the gray dusk, but it must be driven by Vess, of course. Then it was gone.
        The jaunty toot of the horn mocked her, but that mockery wasn't enough to rekindle her anger.
        She stared out at the gloaming and didn't care that it might be the last twilight she ever saw. She cared only that she had spent too much of her twenty-six years alone, with no one at her side to share the sunsets, the starry skies, the turbulent beauty of storm clouds. She wished that she had reached out to people more, instead of retreating inward, wished that she had not made her heart into a sheltering closet. Now, when nothing mattered any more, when the insight couldn't do her any damn good at all, she realized that there was less hope of survival alone than with others. She'd been acutely aware that terror, betrayal, and cruelty had a human face, but she had not sufficiently appreciated that courage, kindness, and